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FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 



THE 



PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 



FROM THE 



STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 



A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTIES OF THE GRADUATE 

SCHOOLS OF ARTS, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE, IN CANDIDACY 

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 



BY 



ARTHUR KENYON ROGERS 



<J* 



CHICAGO 
Cfce 3Rnfbet8(t£ of <Ef)(cago ^rise 

1899 



Hbc "GlniversttE ot Cbtcaoo 

FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 



THE 

PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

FROM THE 

STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 



A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTIES OF THE GRADUATE 

SCHOOLS OF ARTS, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE, IN CANDIDACY 

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 



I 
BY 

ARTHUR KENYON ROGERS 



*£ 



CHICAGO 

Cfce 3Enibenift£ of (tffticago i3iess 
1899 



\ 



^b 






P. 

Publ. 
290 t)l 



THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY FROM THE 
STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS. 

It is not likely that any psychologist of the present day, whatever 
view he may hold as to the field which his science occupies, would be 
inclined to deny that it has at any rate a very intimate connection with 
the nervous mechanism of the body, and particularly with the brain. 
Physical conditions, as everyone knows, are all the time exerting an 
important influence on the conscious life, and it is an easy matter to 
prove that brain activity is the precondition, indispensable, so far as 
we can see, of at least a considerable number of conscious processes. 
It is natural that psychologists should hesitate about setting any arbi- 
trary limit to this interconnection, and should be anxious, in view of 
the fruitful results that have already been gained, to extend the appli- 
cation of physiology to psychology as far as the facts will warrant. 
Without dogmatizing about the relation between mind and body, the 
cautious psychologist conceives himself justified in saying : I have 
found the hypothesis that conscious processes are accompanied by ner- 
vous changes a helpful one within certain fields, and therefore I will 
assume that the same thing holds good throughout the conscious life, 
and will see whether this throws any additional light on psychological 
problems. 

Taken in this undogmatic way, the principle of psycho-physical 
parallelism would be accepted, I suppose, by most modern investi- 
gators. All it purports to be is a working hypothesis, which expressly 
refuses to bother itself with the further metaphysical questions involved. 
And in this, as a special science, psychology is within its right. But 
in the form which parallelism has taken perhaps quite as commonly, 
ultimate questions cannot be so readily avoided. For in this form 
parallelism starts out, not from the demands of the subject-matter of 
psychology, but from a highly metaphysical doctrine brought in from 
a different field. Modern science, from a complicated mixture of meta- 
physical postulates and experimental evidence, has built up the doc- 
trine of the conservation of energy. According to this doctrine, energy 
in the material world is neither lost nor gained, and events conse- 
quently follow upon one another with such a mathematically determi- 
nable connection that the intrusion of any influence in their production 

3 



4 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

which is not represented by preceding physical events is rendered out 
of the question. But consciousness is not a material fact, and so would 
seem somehow to lie wholly outside the chain of physical processes, 
without causal influence upon them. The common belief, therefore, 
that our thoughts and desires in any way influence our actions is a 
delusion ; instead of its being true that mind affects body and body 
affects mind, what in reality we have is two independent series, each 
corresponding in a way to the other, but neither influencing the other 
in any degree. 

No one, probably, who has been at all touched by the scientific 
spirit, can avoid the feeling that there is a good deal of force in this 
argument. It is true that the conservation of energy is not something 
that has been demonstrated, and probably it never will be demon- 
strated ; and the alarming picture of the effects on science in case a 
slight exception to it were to be found in some corner of the brain 
seems to the lay mind a trifle overdrawn. Scientists who, with Pro- 
fessor Clifford, call the hypothesis of a causal effect of mind on body 
"not untrue but nonsense," and who declare that there is no more 
reason for thinking that a new influence enters in connection with the 
brain than at any other point in the universe, are certainly forgetting 
their scientific modesty. Surely there is more evidence for asserting 
that our vision of a falling stone makes us move out of the way than for 
saying that the stone falls through some occult force that is unknown 
to physics ; and if the evidence cannot be expressed in mathematical 
terms, it shows a somewhat provincial spirit on that account to deny 
it any value whatever. Then, again, the argument that the whole idea 
of causation comes up originally in connection with the action of the 
will on the external world, and that therefore the finished concept 
cannot wholly exclude this interconnection, while it may not be very 
conclusive, is not without weight. 1 And yet, in spite of this, the sci- 
entist will not feel convinced. His whole temper of mind points him 
in the direction of a strictly physical explanation of all natural pro- 
cesses, and to give up such an explanation in this case is only possible 
at the expense of an unpleasant wrench, and an abiding sense of intel- 
lectual uneasiness. It is not an easy thing for the psychologist with scien- 
tific training to imagine a molecular motion suddenly stopping without 
further physical effects, to give place to a sensation or memory, or to 
imagine a movement setting up in another part of the brain, inex- 

1 Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, pp. 218 ff. 



FKOM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 5 

plicable from any preceding physical cause. It should be said that 
the first of these suppositions is not necessarily implied in a causal 
relationship between mind and body; we can think of the physical 
effect as going on according to physical laws, at the same time that 
there is an additional by-effect in consciousness, outside the physical 
world. But there is implied of necessity a beginning of motion, or a 
change in the direction of motion, which is not accounted for by 
physical laws, and to this science cannot help but have an instinctive 
objection. 

It must be granted, then, that metaphysical parallelism has a good 
deal in its favor. But because it does involve ultimate questions so 
nearly, its metaphysical bearings cannot be simply thrust to one side 
and neglected, as if they did not matter. As I have said already, 
parallelism in its strictly theoretical form is not a doctrine irresistibly 
demanded by psychological facts ; rather there are a multitude of facts 
which apparently point to a mutual influence between mind and 
body. Indeed, the theory is generally recognized as a paradox ; and if 
it is taken as anything more than a working hypothesis, then the plea 
is not admissible that, as a scientist, the investigator is not bound 
to consider the philosophical bearings of his doctrines, particularly 
as he usually manages to imply a pretty definite philosophical creed. 
It is hardly fair for the scientist to force us to follow him, under 
pain of being judged incompetent to appreciate self-evident truths, 
into regions where contradictions surround us on every side, and 
then to abandon us there with a few words about "ultimate identity," 
and "twofold aspects of reality," which, as we may guess, he leaves 
so general simply because he is unable himself to think out what they 
mean. As involving a metaphysical position already, which, more- 
over, in the most violent way splits up the universe into two seem- 
ingly independent halves, a theory of parallelism can be considered 
as at all successfully established only when the possibility has been 
shown that it can be adjusted to some tolerably consistent world 
view. 

It is the object of this essay to examine the logic of the situation, 
and to discover into what different forms the doctrine of parallelism 
will work out, and whether any of these forms is ultimately tenable. 
I shall precede this with a slight historical sketch of the doctrine. 
This historical sketch, as involving really the whole relation between 
mind and body, might easily become elaborate; but I shall attempt 



6 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

only an outline, leaving it to the more critical exposition to go into 
greater detail. And, finally. I shall try in a tentative way to offer the 
solution of the problem which suggests itself to me, in the hope that 
the critical part of this essay will have pointed out certain considera- 
tions that may give the solution some degree of probability. Already 
in Descartes most of the elements of the modern problem make their 
appearance. Matter and mind are at last clearly distinguished, so 
clearly that it now becomes a serious question how they are ever to 
be related again. In the world of matter mechanism has all but tri- 
umphed completely. Animals, at least, are automata, and if we except 
a very few activities, notably that of speech, the same thing is quite 
conceivable as regards the human body as well. 1 Indeed, man as 
purely sensitive and appetitive is seemingly regarded by Descartes as 
a machine, though the matter is a little complicated by the vacillating 
position which he adopts in reference to sensation, which he assigns 
now to the mental, and now to the physical world. 2 But at any rate 
in the case of man he stops short of pure mechanism, for the mind, as 
a thinking and active substance, has the power to break into the phys- 
ical series, which it does through the medium of the pineal gland, 
where body and soul come into contact. 

The difficulty of making intelligible this mutual influence between 
heterogeneous substances led, in the Cartesian school, to a gradual 
undermining of their substantial character, and an insistence on the 
ultimate reality, God, as the explanation of their interaction. The 
fact of interaction, however, of a change in the physical series finding 
at least its occasion in the mental, was still undisputed. Spinoza 
carried out this tendency to its conclusion. Descartes himself had 
recognized that mind and matter must be substances only in a 
secondary and derived sense ; Spinoza drops the term substance alto- 
gether as referred to them, and they become merely attributes of 
the one eternal substance, God. But with this the problem of their 
interaction at once assumes a different aspect. As each attribute 
expresses the eternal and infinite essence of God, there can no longer 
be any question of their influencing one another, for they are not 
two things, but at bottom one. The one reality manifests itself 
in two different forms, which must therefore both absolutely cor- 
respond, and be absolutely complete, each in itself. For each mode 

1 GEuvres, IX, p. 424. 

3 Cf. K. Fischer, Descartes und seine Schule, Dritte Auflage, Pt. I, p. 429. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS "J 

of extension there is a corresponding mode of thought, but extension 
is modified only by extension, and thought only by thought, never 
the one by the other. This conclusion Spinoza goes on to fortify by 
various empirical examples of what mechanism can accomplish without 
the aid of intelligence, 1 but this is by the way; the real basis of his 
parallelism is metaphysical throughout. 

Leibnitz, no more than Spinoza, can conceive of a mutual interac- 
tion between soul and body, but in endeavoring to account for the 
relationship he strikes out into an entirely new type of theory. Mind 
and matter no longer stand on a metaphysical equality, but the only 
ultimate reals are immaterial beings. Such beings, or monads, exist, 
each shut up within its own nature, and developing of itself, without 
being influenced directly by any other monad. But the nature of the 
monad depends finally upon God, and in determining that nature God 
took due account of all other beings; and so it happens that, without 
the necessity of any influence passing from one monad to another, all 
develop harmoniously together, and each by the very unfolding of its 
own nature reflects the course of the entire world, from its particular 
point of view. 

A host of immaterial beings, however, whose nature consists in per- 
ceptions, does not by itself account for the material world. That 
which lies at the basis of matter is the fact that the monad is not pure 
activity, but has a passive side as well. 1 And this passivity is not a 
mere limitation, but an essential part of its being ; it means that the 
monad is not in reality a thing standing by itself, but that it has a 
relationship to the whole universe. 3 In so far as it is pure activity, it 
sets up the law for other monads ; their activity has to be adjusted to 
it. But, on the other hand, in so far as the law of its nature is deter- 
mined with reference to the activities of other beings, it feels itself 
relatively passive, it fails to find within itself the full explanation of 
its act, and so its perception is confused. 4 Such confused representa- 
tions are what lie at the bottom of our ideas of matter; and since their 
basis is passivity, it is natural to apply the term matter especially to 
those monads which are most passive, and whose representations are 
most confused, while the higher monads are distinguished as souls. 
What, therefore, we ordinarily call matter, the thing which we suppose 

1 Eth., Pt. Ill, Prop. 2, Schol. 

* Philosophische Schriften (ed. Gerhardt), Vol. 7, p. 530. 

*Ibid., Vol. 6, p. 546. *Ibid., Vol. 6, p. 138. 



8 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

to exist in the external world, is due to the confused way in which the 
soul represents the activities going on in other monads. The represen- 
tations themselves, accordingly, are phenomenal, but they point to 
actual realities in the shape of collections of immaterial beings, each 
with its own inner life. Every finite monad, then, by the very fact of 
its inclusion in the life of the universe, must have a body. It must 
mirror, that is, the surrounding monads more or less confusedly, and 
still more confusedly the remoter ones ; and since there are certain 
monads with which it is more closely connected than with others, these 
form for it a body, and through this body, which is affected by every 
movement in the universe, it gets a confused perception of the entire 
world.' The soul gives laws to the body simply by the fact that its 
representations are more distinct, and so have to be taken account of 
in the inner life of the monads of which its body is made up. There 
is no force transference. The soul acts according to final causes, the 
body according to efficient ; 2 neither requires the other to explain it, 
and yet both act in harmony because they have been adjusted at the 
start. 

It probably is apparent already that there is an ambiguity in this 
statement, which, however, Leibnitz himself never fully clears up. It 
may perhaps be put in this way, that the preestablished harmony in 
the inner development of the monads is not altogether equivalent to a 
preestablished harmony between the development of one of the monads, 
the soul, and the actions, not of other monads, but of collections of 
monads, phenomenal bodies. Granting that those ideas in souls 
which represent the quantitative relationships of physical science, the 
series of efficient causes, are distinct, and so that they point to a reality, 
yet they cannot represent real relations between bodies, since bodies 
themselves are phenomenal and not real, and they evidently do not 
directly represent inner activities of other monads, which are not 
material facts but perceptions, and exceedingly confused perceptions 
at that. What we must suppose, accordingly, is this. Our perceptual 
experience has a certain relation to, stands in some way as a sign for, 
that vast system of relationships which make up the body of science. 
The vaguest and most confused feeling of the lowest monad stands in 
a definite connection with the physical influences which are raining in 
upon its body from the entire universe, so that the monad can be said 

1 Philosophische Schriften (ed. Gerhardt), Vol. 6, p. 599. 
a Ibid., Vol. 6, p. 599. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 9 

to mirror, though confusedly, all that is going on in all its fellow- 
monads. But this physical universe of science, again, is not the actual 
world ; it only points back to the ultimate reals, the units of force 
whose actual life is a life of representation, of mental activity, and 
whose relationships it somehow stands for. But these relationships 
between monads evidently have no real existence in a world in which 
the individual monads, shut up within themselves, are the sole reality; 
and therefore, if they are to refer to any reality at all outside their 
actual appearance as representations, it can only be because they point 
to something which exists within the mind of God. We accordingly 
are led to this conception : that the inner life of the monads is arranged 
by God to fit in with, correspond in a way to, a certain set of symbols 
which he has in his mind, and which it is a part of the arrangement 
should be reproduced on occasion in the mind of finite monads, 
which by this means are able, not indeed to know the reality of the 
world, but to know certain relations which themselves have a relation, 
more or less symbolic, to that reality. It is doubtful whether this 
approximation to ideas in the mind of God ought strictly to be called 
preestablished harmony in Leibnitz' sense, and it is perhaps still more 
doubtful whether the translation of the relations between representa- 
tive states in the monads, most of them inconceivably obscure, over 
into the definite quantitative relationships of science, can really have 
any meaning for us. At any rate we are left in the somewhat awkward 
position of having two external worlds on our hands, one made up of 
monads, and one in the mind of God ; and how we are to bring these 
together is far from being clear. Unfortunately Leibnitz never 
attempted to work out the consequences of his theory in a systematic 
way, and his answer to the questions which suggest themselves here is 
necessarily imperfect. 

With Kant there begins a new philosophical development which, 
in the German Idealists, shifts the standpoint from which the whole 
question is approached in so peculiar a way that, while the term parallel- 
ism may still be used, it is doubtful whether we really are dealing with 
the same problem. This came about through the transference of inter- 
est by Kant away from the relation between experience and a reality 
beyond it, to the distinction and the functional relation of elements 
within experience itself. For Kant, indeed, the problem ota.Ding-an- 
sich, of a noumenal reality back of the phenomenal world, still 
remained, and he makes the suggestion that the reality which underlies 



10 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

the manifold of sense and the unifying function of the understanding 
may perhaps be one and the same. 1 But with Fichte the thing-in- 
itself drops away, and Nature becomes only a phase in the activity of 
the Ego, which points to nothing beyond. The Fichtean standpoint 
was accepted by Schelling also, at least in his earlier thought, but in 
Schelling's case the philosophy of nature gradually came to assume 
an independent position alongside that of intelligence. From these 
two relatively independent starting-points, Schelling tried to establish a 
thoroughgoing parallelism between the activity of intelligence in 
creating for itself a world of nature, and the activity which is expressed 
objectively in nature itself, and which rises gradually to intelligence 
in man. And because he took them in this way as independently 
valid, he was at last driven to postulate back of the two series an ulti- 
mate identity, in which the distinction of subjective and objective is 
done away, but which constitutes the ground of both. In Hegel this 
thoroughgoing parallelism disappears again, for since on Schelling's 
own principles nature only exists for intelligence, it clearly ought to 
be subordinated to intelligence, and not put on an equality with it. 
The reconciliation of subject and object is found, therefore, not in an 
ultimate identity, but in Absolute Spirit, for which the distinctions of 
subjective and objective themselves exist, and in relation to which 
they have their meaning. Nature is not a thing by itself, then, but 
only a stage in the development of Absolute Spirit, the phase of 
externality, which in consciousness returns to itself, and is taken up 
as a factor in the higher unity which includes subject and object alike 
as necessary moments in the fullness of its own life. The parallelism 
which is involved in this conception is evidently not the parallelism 
of subjective conscious states with brain movements, but is got at 
rather by tracing in nature the dialectical process for which the general 
schema is given in Logic. A criticism, therefore, can only be directed 
against the general philosophical standpoint which is represented, and 
this does not come within the scope of the present essay. 

In Schopenhauer we have a return to Kant and to the thing-in- 
itself, but to the thing-in-itself as identified with Will. The parallel- 
ism is thus drawn between the noumenal reality which reveals itself in 
our conscious life as will, and, on the other hand, nature, the world of 
idea, which is not the product of will, but its phenomenal appearance. 
There is consequently no causal relation between the will and the 

1 Kritik (ed. Adickes), p. 693. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS II 

objective world ; causation only applies between phenomena. With 
Schopenhauer we come closer to the standpoint of natural science, but 
the scientific interest does not become supreme until we get to Fech- 
ner, who was the first to approach the problem definitely from the 
side of the scientific doctrine of the conservation of energy, and its 
applicability to the brain processes. Fechner's solution follows in gen- 
eral the lines which Leibnitz had marked out, but with important dif- 
ferences. With Leibnitz he makes reality essentially spiritual ; my 
real self is my consciousness, my body is only the appearance which 
this presents to an outsider. So, too, Fechner agrees with Leibnitz in 
carrying the psychical aspects of reality down below man and the ani- 
mals, into the plant, and even into the inorganic world. But whereas 
for Leibnitz the monads were independent bits of reality, and God 
was apparently another reality alongside of them, whose relation- 
ship to them was, moreover, very problematical, Fechner makes his 
whole theory turn upon this relationship, and consequently he is led 
in the opposite direction from the monadology of his predecessor. 
God is the one reality who includes within himself all finite lives, and 
these have their being, therefore, not as hard and fast, mutually exclu- 
sive existences, but only as elements in the one great consciousness of 
God. And so in the physical world, motion does not depend upon 
forces which belong to the individual atoms, but the law of motion is 
bound up with the unity of the system to which the atoms belong. If 
now we ask why my consciousness should be split off as it is from the 
rest, the answer is found in the law of the threshold. A certain defi- 
nite intensity, which Fechner supposed could be reduced to a mathe- 
matical law, raises conscious processes above the level of surrounding 
processes, and gives them a relative independence. Such semi-isolated 
systems are what we know as individual minds. Only those processes 
which are enabled in this way to cross the threshold are, accordingly, 
experienced directly by the individual whom they constitute ; all 
others appear to him as objective, as material. Since, however, we know 
reality in ourselves, we can infer that the true nature of the external 
world, likewise, is of a piece with this. The bond between the inner 
and the outer aspect is conformity to law. The same law which is 
revealed in the particular collocation of atomic motions in the external 
world which makes up the unified body, manifests itself directly as the 
unity of consciousness. 

Since Fechner's time, and largely through his influence, parallelism, 



12 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

in one form or another, has been somewhat widely adopted, without, 
however, bringing out much that is essentially new. Among those 
who have accepted Fechner's solution are, notably, Paulsen, and, with 
modifications, Wundt, while Riehl has shown a tendency to go back to 
Kant. In England the doctrine has also sprung largely from the sci- 
entific interest, and has been brought forward mainly by scientists of 
a philosophical turn, who have been led to it through the exigencies 
of the scientific law of the conservation of energy. Here belong, in 
particular, Lewes' positivistic parallelism, Huxley's automatism, and 
Clifford's mind-stuff theory. The latter theory is given a somewhat 
original turn by Romanes. 1 Instead of finding the reality of the 
external world in psychologically inexplicable bits of mind-stuff, by 
following the analogy of the human consciousness he reaches the con- 
ception of nature as the phenomenal appearance of one great consci- 
ousness, the mind of God. This, of course, is closely related to the 
position of Fechner and his followers, but differs from it in that it 
apparently does not give a separate psychical life to individual things, 
apart from such beings in the organic world as we ordinarily endow 
with consciousness. Finally it may be noted that parallelism is being 
very generally accepted by recent psychologists, either as a philo- 
sophical creed or as a working hypothesis, usually, however, without 
any great amount of elaboration being attempted. It is evident from 
the foregoing sketch that the principle of parallelism is capable of a 
number of very different metaphysical interpretations, and the main 
types of these I shall now go on to consider. 

The essential feature of parallelism, as I shall discuss it, is this, that 
there are two series of facts, brain changes and conscious processes, 
which on their face are of a totally different nature ; and that the phys- 
ical series, at any rate, is an unbroken one, whose complete physical 
explanation is furnished without any help from the outside. There 
are four general types of theory with which, conceivably, this might be 
consistent. It may be that mind and matter are two different sub- 
stances, meaning by substance a special and separate kind of reality ; 
and that each is entirely inadequate of itself to account for anything 
whatever in connection with the other. Or it may be that the physical 
series is the reality, of which mind is only an epiphenomenon, with 
no physical effects. Or it may be, again, what at present under vari- 
ous forms goes by the name of monism, that mind and brain are not 

x Mind and Motion and Monism, New York, 1895. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 1 3 

independent, but are aspects, or sides, or whatever you please, of a 
single reality, whose relation to them has thereupon to be discovered. 
And, finally, one may suppose, with various shades of meaning, that 
the reality is wholly ideal, though it will not be possible to draw any 
strict line of division between this and the preceding type of theory. 

The difficulties which beset the common way of looking at mind 
and body as two distinct substances have had a large part to play in 
philosophy since the time of Descartes, and the various attempts to 
meet the difficulties have only served to bring them into stronger 
relief. Those attempts which imply a mutual influence between the 
two, either directly, or indirectly through the power of God, do not 
concern us here. Assuming the principle of parallelism, two possibili- 
ties are open. It may be that we can only say : Here are two sub- 
stances, two separate realities, which as a matter of fact do run along 
parallel to one another, without our being able to say anything more 
about it. It is evident that this is the negation of philosophy. If the 
substances are really distinct, then the parallelism is a wholly surpris- 
ing and inexplicable fact ; if there really is a parallelism, then some 
relationship is necessarily implied, which the theory by its own admis- 
sion is unable to account for. It must be, then, that there is a third 
reality which is able to furnish a reason for the relationship between 
the first two. This third reality, which we may call God, creates, pre- 
sumably, the two series, each complete in itself ; but by reason of their 
common relationship to God they show a relationship to each other. 
But if the former theory would make two substances, this makes three, 
and all the difficulties are retained which philosophical thought has 
found in representing to itself the action of one substance on another 
of an entirely different nature. One can only say that mind and mat- 
ter are products of the divine creative will, and this is no explanation, 
but a falling back on divine power which, in ways inscrutable to us, 
makes all things possible. 

Much more commonly held as an explicit theory is materialistic 
parallelism, and of this, with some reservations in both cases, Profes- 
sor Huxley and Herr Munsterberg may be taken as representatives. 
In the face of his repeated remonstrances I do not want to accuse Mr. 
Huxley of being a materialist, but I think that the criticism of his 
position will fairly apply to the cruder doctrine of materialism as well. 
In so far, that is, as consciousness is taken as a product of that 
essential reality which is represented in the physical world, and a 



14 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

product which, in turn, has no voice whatever in determining the 
future changes which this basal reality is to undergo, the position is 
essentially the same, whether the world is regarded as adequately 
described in terms of matter or not. It is not easy to decide precisely 
what Mr. Huxley would accept as the final form of his belief, but one 
thing at least stands out with sufficient clearness. Consciousness, he 
says, is as much a function of matter as motion is. Sooner or later 
we shall arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, as of heat. 
We have as much reason for regarding the mode of motion of the 
nervous system as the cause of the states of consciousness as for regard- 
ing any event as the cause of another. There is as much propriety in 
saying that the brain evolves sensation as that iron evolves heat. Con- 
sciousness, on the other hand, cannot be conceived, in turn, as having 
any effect on matter. It cannot cause motion, but is a mere collateral 
product. The soul is to the body as the bell of the clock to its works, 
and consciousness is as much without effect as the sound when the bell 
is struck. 1 

If we take these words in their most obvious meaning — and strict 
materialism at least does this — then the body is an automaton, pro- 
ducing a certain by-product which we call consciousness, but absolutely 
uninfluenced by consciousness in turn. But this position is an unjusti- 
fiable one. If nervous changes are the cause of consciousness in any 
sense of the word which has meaning to the scientist, then energy must 
be expended in producing it; and if consciousness represents energy 
expended, it not only may, but must, influence the brain in return. It 
is arbitrary to allow causality in one direction while we deny it in the 
other. To be consistent we must either say, with the thoroughgoing 
materialist, that consciousness is material, and consequently both influ- 
ences and is influenced ; or, if we persist in calling it an unessential 
by-product, then we must admit that the word product has in strictness 
no scientific meaning, and that we have not really succeeded in cor- 
relating consciousness with the physical world at all, but have left it 
standing as something isolated and inexplicable. The physical analo- 
gies which Professor Huxley uses really do not mean anything when 
we look at them closely ; heat and sound as such are themselves facts 
of consciousness; they are not analogous to, but identical with, that 
which they are used to throw light upon. As a fact of consciousness, 
sound is just what is to be explained ; as a physical product, the sound 

•Lay Sermons, pp. 338-9 ; Science and Culture, pp. 242-5, New York, 1890. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS I 5 

of the bell is not without effect, but has definite physical results. And 
it may be well to mention the psychological consequence that, on 
Professor Huxley's statement, each element of consciousness is a 
separate fact produced directly by the physical mechanism, and that 
between different facts of consciousness there is, accordingly, no con- 
nection. 

For materialism this reply holds good unreservedly; it would not 
be fair, however, to leave Mr. Huxley here, for he has a more or less 
definite philosophical creed which puts a more complicated aspect on 
the matter. As nearly as I can interpret him, his philosophy is as fol- 
lows : The only thing that we can know directly is states of conscious- 
ness. What we call matter, therefore, is not ultimate ; it is wholly 
inconceivable that extension should exist independently of such a 
consciousness as our own. 1 All I can mean when I say that thought 
is a property of matter is that, actually or possibly, a consciousness of 
extension and of resistance accompanies all other sorts of conscious- 
ness.' Whenever those states of consciousness which we call sensa- 
tions, etc., come into existence, complete investigation will show reason 
for the belief that they are preceded by those other phenomena of 
consciousness which we give the names of matter and motion. 5 But 
back of these phenomena we may conceive that there is a reality which 
is their cause, but between which and the sensation no similarity is 
imaginable. 4 For between the cause and the sense effect the nervous 
system intervenes. As Mr. Huxley, however, has failed to work out 
his conception in detail, it becomes necessary here to interpret him. 
Two possibilities, I think, are open. Either Mr. Huxley means that 
sensations break up into two quite distinct series, and that one series, 
comprising sensations of extension and resistance, forms a closed 
circle, upon which none of the remaining sensations have any influ- 
ence ; or else, when he says that sensations have no influence on the 
material world, he is not to be understood as meaning that one set of 
sensations has no influence on another set, but is referring to all sen- 
sations alike. In the first case the two series are separated absolutely; 
in the second they are separated for one purpose, and classed together 
for another. If we are to hold him strictly to his assertion that sen- 
sations are all that we possibly can know, then the first of these mean- 
ings is the only legitimate one. But in that case the statements that 

* Lay Sermons, p. 327. 3 Hume, p. 95, New York, 1894. 

% Ibid., p. 341. ■♦Science and Culture, p. 216. 



1 6 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

he makes lose all their plausibility. This closed circle of sensations 
of extension and resistance, which are supposed to accompany all 
others, is something that no one ever has experienced or can expe- 
rience, and consequently by definition it has no reality. For, not to 
speak of other difficulties, it is wholly out of the question that I, when 
I have the sensation of red, should see the movement in my brain that 
accompanies it. It may be said that if I cannot see the movement 
myself, at least some one else who is looking on might do so. Grant- 
ing the fact, which is a somewhat doubtful one, all that we have, never- 
theless, is another sensation in another man's mind. My sensation 
does not enter into his consciousness, nor his into mine, and it is 
difficult to see how, without a number of highly important assumptions, 
the two are to be correlated at all, even if we admit the existence of 
this second fact. It is noticeable that the sensationalist philosopher 
usually considers that he is very ill-used if he is not allowed in the 
interest of common sense to drop his principles long enough to assume 
the existence of other minds in communication with our own, where- 
upon he takes them up again as if nothing had happened, and pro- 
ceeds to reason on them for the future with great rigor. But allowing 
that the assumptions are legitimate, then to get what we are after we 
should have to say, not that the other man has a sensation, simply, but 
that, through its effect upon his own brain, he has been made aware 
of a fact which is not merely his sensation, and which is connected 
with my sensation of red. But here we fall naturally into a theory 
quite different from Mr. Huxley's, the theory, namely, that sensation 
and brain movement stand for a single fact, in one instance as it is 
experienced directly, and in the other as it appears to a looker-on. 
For my sensation, which is a fact standing on its own merits, and the 
vision of brain movement, which points to a real process, and is medi- 
ated by an observer's brain, are at any rate not upon quite the same 
level ; they are still differentiated, even if one does not adopt the 
monistic view. Both would still involve the same reality, but in a dif- 
ferent way ; the reality which manifests itself phenomenally as molec- 
ular motion causes the sensation of red. But with this difference, it 
is a question whether we have a right to take them, in the way Mr. 
Huxley, without further criticism, does take them, as perfectly homo- 
geneous facts. 

The last paragraph is sufficient to show that Mr. Huxley actually 
has in mind the second of the two alternatives mentioned, and that he 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 1 7 

really is opposing all sensations alike to certain realities beyond them, 
not one set of sensations to another set. Indeed, the latter concep- 
tion is not only not plausible, it is, so far as I can see, pretty nearly 
meaningless. To say that hypothetical sensations of molecular motion 
condition sensations of color, while these exert no influence in turn, 
is, if we are really talking of sensations only, an absurdity. Taking, 
then, the other as his real meaning, I have three remarks to make. In 
the first place Mr. Huxley does not show us, and, so far as I am aware, 
does not make an attempt to show us, how, if .sensations are all we 
can know, we are to pass from mere sensation to a reality back of it. 
In the second place I do not see, in particular, what right we have on 
the same showing to split up our sensations into two classes, and allow 
only one of these to point to a reality beyond, while we deny this to 
the other. Granted, however, that these difficulties have been sur- 
mounted, what precisely is the conception with which we are left? 
Well, the material world with which we are dealing is no longer sen- 
sation, but those real processes which sensations, or certain of them, 
reveal. This is clear from the fact that if we deal with it as sensation, 
the relationship to a human brain is always involved ; whereas, of course, 
the physicist is concerned with the processes in themselves, not as they 
affect an organism. Upon these real processes all our conscious life 
depends, the so-called objective sensations as well as the subjective ; 
and it is therefore obviously impossible that one of these should be 
the cause of the other. But we must suppose, I should say, that there 
is some real connection between unknown processes and sensations, 
and between the unknown processes themselves ; otherwise we have 
asserted, not only that we cannot unify the world ourselves completely, 
but that no such unity exists. Furthermore I should say that the 
relations which exist between the sensations to which we give the name 
of matter would have to correspond to real relations in the underlying 
noumena, or we should have no basis for saying that the physical series 
was shut up within itself, and that consciousness had no effect upon it. 
What now Mr. Huxley's theory would mean, if translated into these 
changed terms, would be this, that the phenomenal appearance of the 
unknown reality can be explained, or predicted, solely from the data 
given in one particular sort of sensations which we call objective. The 
relations which hold between these — more or less hypothetical — sen- 
sations of extension and resistance, and these relations alone, we 
assume apply to reality ; material processes, that is, indicated by such 



1 8 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

sensations, are to find their sufficient explanation in other material 
processes ; they are to be conceived as capable of giving rise to a series 
of sensations which ideally would form an unbroken chain, in which 
no other sensations have any place, but which would themselves, no 
more than these other sensations, enter into the corresponding but 
more ultimate circle of actual processes for which, as sensations, they 
stand. This at least conveys a fairly definite meaning, and I have at 
present only two things to say in reference to it. It has been reached, 
as has been noticed already, by a process of assumption rather than of 
proof, and is in contradiction to the premises from which it started. 
And, in the second place, even if it is granted, it still fails to meet the 
difficulty which was mentioned at the start, and while it justifies the 
scientific demand for a mechanical explanation, it does so only at the 
expense of leaving sensation altogether outside the intelligible scheme 
of things. There seems to be a possibility, indeed, by going a step 
further than Mr. Huxley does, of reaching, on the basis of these same 
results, a more organic view, and so of introducing once more the 
causal efficiency of the conscious series. For strict automatism here 
would imply that the action of an unknown reality in producing a 
known reality, sensation, is entirely without influence on the relation 
which the former bears to the other unknown real processes thereafter; 
and this not only cannot be proved, but, if we regard the world as a 
unity, it is altogether improbable. This, however, represents a some- 
what different type of theory from Mr. Huxley's, and it will come up 
again at a later point in the discussion. 

To criticise adequately Professor Miinsterberg's doctrine of paral- 
lelism would mean a discussion of the whole question as to the prob- 
lem of psychology. Inasmuch, however, as he stops short of a 
metaphysical theory, if indeed he would allow that such a thing is 
possible, I do not think it is necessary for my purpose to attempt such 
a task. Miinsterberg starts in avowedly from the scientific rather than 
from the philosophical standpoint, and makes the postulates, which 
science ordinarily makes, of a double series of facts, the external world 
and conscious processes. Now the external world is explained when 
it is reduced to a series of continuously intuitable processes ; z and the 
world of consciousness, when it is analyzed into sensations which can 
be reproduced in the individual. 2 Between conscious facts, however, 

'Schriften der Gesellschaft fur psychologische Forschung, Vol. I, p. 104. 
2 Ibid., p. 106. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS IO, 

there is no necessary connection such as exists in the physical series. 1 
But now experience shows that conscious facts depend upon certain 
physical processes, brain processes, namely, as their condition. If, 
accordingly, each sensation can be correlated with a definite brain 
event, the necessary connection, which is lacking by nature to con- 
sciousness, can be transferred to it from the other series.* This is a 
brief statement of Miinsterberg's position, and it evidently leaves 
things in much too disjointed a state to be taken as a finished philoso- 
phy. The two series stand completely apart, for causation has no 
meaning between them, but only between physical facts; 3 and when 
we are given leave, if we wish to picture the relation, to use the image 
of an inner side, the suggestion suffers too much from the vagueness 
I have previously noticed in parallelistic theories to be worth anything 
as an explanation. 

If we take this last suggestion as serious, Miinsterberg would have 
to be classed as a representative of the third form in which parallelism 
may be held, the form which is most widely accepted at the present 
day, and which has especially gained for itself the title of monism. 
The various forms of monistic theory are frequently lumped together 
as if, because they spoke of matter and mind as two aspects of a single 
reality, they all were practically of the same type. As a matter of fact, 
these words may be used to characterize a number of different, and 
indeed irreconcilable, standpoints. Accordingly it will not be necessary 
to dwell upon such general statements as, for instance, that of Hoff- 
ding, 4 which hardly do more than raise the problem. As has been said 
already, it is not of much metaphysical value to assert that we have 
two manifestations of one and the same being, that a single principle 
has found its expression in a double form, unless we at least indicate a 
way in which this may be conceived. It is not hard to see that such a 
statement merely veils the difficulty, unless we make it far more explicit. 
What do we mean when we speak of two sides of a single substance? 
The image is only misleading when carried outside the physical realm. 
We have simply made the assertion that mind and matter are one, and 
have not explained it in the least or shown how it is possible. For us 
the two are distinct and different ; we cannot squeeze them together as 
we might two lumps of dough, and call them parts of the one lump 

1 Schriften der Gesellschaft fur psychologische Forschung, Vol. I, p. in. 
''Ibid., p. 117. 4 Psychology, chap. ii. 

*Ibid., p. 117. 



20 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

which they form. The fact that, on any theory which admits their 
separateness, one is known only indirectly and through the other, is 
enough to keep us from thus putting them on an equality, to say nothing 
of identifying them. It is this which makes the analogy of aspects, or 
sides, misleading; for the aspects of a thing are both alike aspects to a 
perceiving mind, and it is just at this point that the comparison breaks 
down. Such a mode of expression apparently thinks that a theory of 
knowledge is unnecessary. We may pass on, therefore, to the more 
definite types of theory. And these will naturally fall into two main 
classes, according as the two aspects are regarded as standing on a 
metaphysical equality, and the real as an unknown something back of 
them ; or according as they are looked on as an outer and an inner 
side, of which the inner gives us reality in its truer form. As a further 
principle of division, we may distinguish theories which make the dis- 
tinction of aspects apply to reality as a whole, and those which con- 
fine it to the individual organism ; and, again, between atomistic and 
non-atomistic theories. It will not prove feasible to carry out a rigid 
schematism, but the different phases of theory will take their places 
without much forcing in the course of the discussion. 

If we begin with the metaphysics which puts thought and matter 
on an equality, and which finds in the distinction between them a 
characteristic of reality as such in its whole extent, we have of course 
the classical expression in Spinoza. It is perhaps misleading to go 
on and say that for Spinoza the reality is back of these, as something 
unknown. Undoubtedly he intends to assert that thought and exten- 
sion are real characteristics of substance, and that in knowing them we 
know substance in its very essence. Nevertheless we do practically 
have to fall back on something very like an unknown reality. Without 
this we are left simply with a string of attributes, each of them pos- 
sessing a quasi-independence of its own, and only making up the one 
substance as taken in their sum. It seems clear, however, that sub- 
stance is regarded, not as the sum of attributes, but as an underlying 
unity which it is difficult to speak about except as a reality behind 
them, and which is related to them, moreover, not in such a way that 
one attribute expresses a part of the substance and another attribute 
another part, but so that each single attribute expresses fully the essence 
of the one undivided substance regarded in different ways. It is true 
that this does not make the matter much plainer when we try to think 
it out ; one might rather say that, while the attributes are undoubtedly 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 2 1 

expressions of a substance which is one and indivisible, the whole 
problem of the relation involved is fundamentally obscure, and will 
not admit of any clear solution, so long, at least, as, with Spinoza, we 
assume uncritically the fact of knowledge. We can make more intel- 
ligible this conception of attributes as expressions of the essence of 
reality under different aspects by reference to a consciousness to which 
they are aspects ; and probably it is because he had this intelligible 
meaning in his mind, without distinguishing it accurately from the 
other, that the difficulties failed to appeal to him more strongly. On 
this view attributes would be merely subjective modes in which reality 
appears to us, and many of Spinoza's statements might, in fact, have 
this significance attached to them if taken by themselves. As a mat- 
ter of fact, there is hardly any doubt that he would have repudiated 
this meaning, and would have stuck to the objective interpretation of 
the attributes. But at any rate we find ourselves confronted here with 
a real difficulty for parallelism — the difficulty, that is, of keeping 
thought down to the level of the other attributes. If attribute is 
defined as "that which the intellect perceives of substance as consti- 
tuting its essence," intellect has a position which is decidedly unique, 
including, as it must, all other attributes within itself; or, rather, exist- 
ing as a parallel series to each separate attribute. For if it does not 
do this, then, apart from the change which would be required in the 
definition, there would be a special relation between the attributes of 
thought and of extension which would have to be explained. 

The extreme difficulty of working the conception out, however, 
only comes to light when we consider Spinoza's doctrine of modes, as 
it bears upon the relation of mind and body. The two attributes, 
extension and thought, are entirely distinct ; but for each mode of 
extension there is a corresponding mode of thought, or idea, and con- 
sequently the first thing that forms the actual being of the human 
mind is the idea of an individual thing actually existing; that is, the 
body. 1 Now, what we should naturally understand by this would be 
that there is an extended thing on the one hand, and an idea of it on 
the other, and that the thought series is simply a copy of the extended 
series. And sometimes it is evident that this is what Spinoza has in 
mind. When he says that a true idea must agree with that of which 
it is an idea, 8 this is the sense in which he is using the words. How- 

1 Ethic, Pt. II, Prop. II. 

2 Pt. I, Ax. 6; cf. Pt. II, Prop. 7,Schol.; Prop. 32. 



22 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

ever, if the same conception were applied to the particular case of mind 
and body, it would mean that the human mind consists of an exact 
knowledge of the human body, and this is very plainly not the case. 
In order to meet the facts of experience it is necessary to shift the 
meaning of the words, and the justification of this is as follows : Modes 
are not realities in themselves, and they are not effects that follow from 
God, even, in so far as God is infinite, but only in so far as he is 
affected by another mode. 1 So the human body, as a mode, or a col- 
lection of modes, of extension, is caused by God as affected by other 
modes of extension ; and the idea of the body, similarly, is caused by 
God as affected by other modes of thought, the ideas of other things. 2 
Since, then, God does not have an adequate knowledge of the body 
simply as he constitutes the essence of the human mind, but as he 
includes other modes as well, that which makes up the human mind is 
not true and distinct ideas of the human body by itself, but ideas of 
the affections of this body through the action of other modes of exten- 
sion, ideas which, since they involve the nature both of our own and of 
external bodies, are confused and inadequate. All which means, trans- 
lated into modern terms, that every conscious fact is dependent on 
the action of the external world in setting up processes in the bodily 
organism ; but that the resulting state is not a copy either of the exter- 
nal vibrations or of the brain movements, as to the very existence of 
which it is of course wholly in the dark. 

Obviously Spinoza has no right whatever to use these two meanings 
interchangeably ; but this is exactly what he does. There are conse- 
quently two strains running through all his argument which have to be 
carefully distinguished in order to give an intelligible sense to what he 
says. I am by no means sure that I am able to interpret Spinoza in a 
satisfactory way ; and to follow him, indeed, into the details of interpre- 
tation would lie outside my purpose. But a general statement of what 
I understand him to mean will probably not be far' from the truth, and 
it will serve to bring out the difficulties in his parallelism, which is 
what I have chiefly in view. I think, then, that we may get some idea 
of what Spinoza intends by entirely setting aside, to begin with, the 
conscious lives of individuals, and the world as it comes to us through 
the senses, and by looking merely to the world of science. Suppose 
we take the conception of a world formula, from which, in terms simply 
of matter and motion, the whole course of the universe, and every par- 

1 Ethic, Pt. I, Prop. 28. 2 Pt. II, Props. 19, 24 ff. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 23 

ticular thing in it, can be rigidly calculated. Without attributing just 
this conception to Spinoza, he undoubtedly held that something analo- 
gous to it constitutes the reality, just as the ordinary scientist does at 
the present day. He differed from the ordinary scientist in two ways. 
In the first place, he held that the reality is simply a matter of perfect 
definition and logical deduction. From the bare definition of God an 
infinite number of things can be deduced :* from God, the attributes ; 
from the attribute of extension, motion and rest ; from motion and 
rest, other properties ; and so on, the whole forming a perfect logical 
chain, to each link of which the idea of God gives eternal necessity and 
validity. It is to these properties, beginning with motion and rest, 
that Spinoza gives the name of infinite modes. 2 In the second place, 
the scientist regards his world as a world of matter simply ; for Spi- 
noza, corresponding to each mode of extension there is a mode of 
thought as well. And this is what, from one point of view, he means 
by the thoroughgoing parallelism of thought and extension. It is not 
a parallelism with finite states of consciousness, but only a recognition 
of the fact that the world of science is not matter simply, but matter 
that can be represented in thought terms, and that thought, therefore, 
has an equal right to existence with extension. These eternal and 
unchanging modes of thought, corresponding to eternal modes of 
extension, are what constitute the infinite intellect of God. 3 It is here 
we find room for that eternal part of the human mind which existed 
before the body came into being, and will continue to exist after 
it is destroyed. 4 

Even taking this conception entirely by itself, we at once stumble 
on a difficulty in carrying out the parallelism, in consequence of a new 
series which is immediately introduced, the idece idearum. To know, 
according to Spinoza, is to know that one knows, and so we have a 
second series of ideas which is connected with the first, as the first is 
connected with extension. But this breaks down the exactness of the 
parallelism in any case, and, moreover, the analogy of the connection 
with the bodily series will not hold. For while extension and thought 
are wholly unconnected, thoughts, and thoughts of thoughts, belong to 
the same attribute, and therefore have a causal relation to one another 
apart from correspondence. But it is not necessary to dwell upon this, 
in view of the fact that the whole standpoint, whatever its scientific 

'Ethic, Pt. I, Prop. 16. * Cf. Pt. I, Prop. 16. 

* Pt. I, Prop. 23. « Pt. V, Prop. 23. 



24 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

value, is not parallelism at all. Parallelism, if it means anything, 
means the correspondence of thoughts to processes in the outer world ; 
what Spinoza means, so far, is the intelligibility, the capacity of being 
put in thought terms, of an eternal universe, from which finite thoughts 
have been completely dropped. When he talks of thought as coexten- 
sive with things, he does not mean, at least in so far as he is really in 
earnest with his conception, that a stone thinks ; he means that a stone 
can be reduced to certain modes of extension which are thinkable. It 
is only when we take up the second relation of body and mind that we 
approach the real problem of parallelism. 

In passing from infinite to finite modes, to thoughts and things as 
we know them, we come upon the great gap in Spinoza's system. 
Hitherto reality has been looked upon as timeless, a system of neces- 
sary relations. But what, then, are we to do with the finite and 
changeable, with things and thoughts that come into existence and 
disappear ? Spinoza answers by begging the question, for, as Profes- 
sor Caird says, after declaring that the finite mode is as such unreal, it 
is no explanation to go on and say that each particular mode can only 
be accounted for through another mode. Hitherto cause has been 
identified with ground ; now all at once we have to admit a new kind 
of causality, to account for the temporal existence of modes as over 
against their essence, and a causality, moreover, which, strangely 
enough, depends for its effectiveness upon finiteness itself, that is, 
upon negation. 1 The general difficulties, however, are sufficiently 
plain, and we may pass to the special bearings upon parallelism. 

But even yet there is one more stage through which we must pass 
before we get to the actual facts of our conscious lives. This is the 
stage of the ordinary scientific conception of a world of finite pro- 
cesses, which appear and pass away, but which are connected by neces- 
sary laws. Between this and the infinite modes, as has been said, there 
is an essential difference. Infinite modes follow directly from the 
nature of God himself, and apparently by this method we can reach 
the essences of things. But their existence as events in time depends 
upon other finite processes, aud these again on others, and so on in an 
infinite series. 2 But now these finite processes, once more, are think- 
able, and so they have corresponding finite modes of thought, which 
truly represent them, just as was the case with the infinite modes. 3 

1 Martineau, Study of Spinoza, p. 206. 3 Pt. II, Prop. 7, Schol. 

2 Ethic, Pt. I, Prop. 28. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 25 

Here we find a place for that "idea of a human body actually exist- 
ing" which constitutes the original being of the human mind, although 
it may be entirely lacking from the individual consciousness which we 
ordinarily call human. But here again we only have the world of 
science duplicated, in terms both of thought and of extension, and not 
at all the particular events of our conscious lives. It is now time to 
turn to these directly. 

It must be remarked, in the first place, that when "idea" is taken 
as the finite conscious state that goes along with a certain brain state, 
not only does an idea not as a rule truly represent its correlate in 
extension, but it never by any possibility can do so. For if a certain 
movement accompanies a certain conscious state, the consciousness 
that knows this movement must be accompanied by a second and a 
different brain state, and so on forever. The consequence of this is 
that parallel to finite modes of extension there are two thought series, 
one which is an accurate copy of the modes of extension themselves, 
and which is represented by the " idea of a human body actually exist- 
ing," and another, represented by our actual thoughts and sensations, 
which never is a copy of the modes of extension. But now the ques- 
tion comes up whether we are not in reality left with modes of thought 
merely, without any modes of extension at all. For if these modes of 
extension exist, how are we to get at them ? Apparently it must either 
be through thought or through imagination. Now, through thought 
we can get adequate ideas in this way : we can say that anything in 
our perceptions is real which is common to all modes of extension 
alike, for since it belongs both to the external object and to our own 
body, we can be sure that it is not due to the confusion caused by their 
interaction, and so that we have got at the real nature of an object as 
such. 1 These ideas are, notably, extension, and motion and rest ; and 
these, along with whatever can be deduced from them, are the only 
ideas which are adequate. But by this method we cannot possibly get 
outside the infinite modes ; it can teach us nothing whatever about 
finite modes of extension. There is left, then, only imagination, 
to which, indeed, the modes of extension are directly referred by Spi- 
noza; 2 but it is not easy to see by what path we are to .reach them. 
No finite thought gives us its corresponding brain state directly, at all 
events, and so it must give us some other mode than the one with 
which it is correlated. And this we naturally think it does when it 

'Ethic, Pt. II, Props. 38 ff. »Pt. II, Prop. 17, Schol. 



26 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

refers us to things in the outer world. Spinoza sometimes adopts this 
naive point of view, and can say, for example, that the body exists as 
we know it. But such a possibility is overthrown by his whole theory 
of perception. For it appears that what is given us in perception is a 
confused idea, in which the nature of our own body and the nature of 
external bodies are inextricably mixed up together. Indeed, what we 
get in this way, par excellence, is the nature of our own body as 
affected. 1 How now are we to get the two disentangled ? How make 
the confused idea adequate ? This Spinoza does not tell us. Every- 
thing that we get through perception is of this confused nature ; what 
we call objects are in reality affections of our own body; these very 
objects, even if they are supposed to give us modes at all, are not to be 
regarded as single modes, but as collections of them ; it is hard to see 
how we ever are to get order out of this chaos. Our simplest way is to 
follow Spinoza himself, and to say that finite modes of extension are 
essentially unreal. 2 

There is still one more difficulty to consider in Spinoza's system, 
the relation between our adequate and our inadequate ideas. The posi- 
tion which our ordinary consciousness holds in the universe is plainly 
anomalous. Since God is everything, there can, of course, be no 
room for it outside of God, and yet it is accorded a place within God's 
nature very grudgingly, and it is only our adequate ideas — ideas, that 
is, of God and his attributes, and of whatever flows from these — that 
are really said to form a part of the divine intellect. But just in what 
sense this latter statement is true is a little dubious. We cannot 
identify these ideas with what already has appeared as the divine intel- 
lect, for, while they refer to the same objects, they are not by any 
means the same. They are particular thoughts — thoughts, say, of exten- 
sion as infinite — which appear in individual men; and, on this show- 
ing, to make the parallelism complete, we should have to suppose a 
number of infinite extensions, to correspond with the thoughts of 
different men. It is, indeed, only through this somewhat inexplicable 
reference to realities that such thoughts differ from their neighbors, 
and that is not enough to dissolve their connection with other finite 
thoughts. The fact that they refer to an absolute cause does not take 
them out of the necessary connection in which, as thoughts, they stand, 
though Spinoza might seem to imply this at times. He is inclined, as 
it seems to me, to swallow up their existence as thoughts in their 

1 Ethic, Pt. II, Prop. 25. 2 Cf. Pt. II, Prop. 17, Schol. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 27 

objective reference, and to transfer to them the infinity and the inde- 
pendence of bodily conditions which belong to their objects, the 
attributes or God as such. 1 And when he does remember that, after 
all, they are thoughts in individuals, he compromises on the idea of a 
series which never ends, just as in the case of the finite modes, but 
whose members yet are eternal, a conception whose accordance with 
Spinoza's principles can at least be questioned. 2 

The special type of parallelism which Spinoza represents has not 
found many direct imitators, but perhaps this is the most convenient 
point for considering briefly the statements of a recent writer, Mr. 
Lloyd Morgan, although what Mr. Morgan has to say appears to me 
somewhat fluctuating in its tendencies. He begins by contending that 
it is only artificially that subject and object ever have been separated. 
What we have given originally is just a bit of common experience; 
subject and object are distinguishable aspects of what in experience is 
one, and these distinguishable products of our abstract thought we 
have endowed with independent existence. 3 This might mean that 
experience falls apart into two series, some of the elements of expe- 
rience entering into one, and some into the other; or it might mean, 
again, that the same thing which, objectively considered, we call an 
object, subjectively is a group of sensations ; that is, the self. I 
suspect that these two meanings are more or less confused, but either 
interpretation will fall in with the criticism I have to make. And I do 
not see how either of them is to be reconciled with what Mr. Morgan 
goes on to say about the continued existence of something correspond- 
ing to the objective side, whether it is perceived or not. 4 If, when he 
says that the object is simply a distinguishable aspect, he means no 
more than that the particular psychosis which stands for object is not 
a thing independent of the subject, the psychical series itself, he is 
saying what no one denies. What, however, we ordinarily mean when 
we speak of subject and object as distinct, is just this continued exist- 
ence of a something which the object in consciousness refers to, and 
Mr. Morgan therefore admits all that is asked of him. But one does 
not see by what right he thus puts a separate reality back of what is 
only an abstraction. 

This, however, is only the starting-point of Mr. Morgan's theory, 

1 Cf. Ethic, Pt. V, Prop. 39. 3 Pt. V, Prop. 40, Schol. 

3 Introduction to Comparative Psychology, p. 2, London, 1894. 
*Ibid., p. 3. 



28 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

and the logic of his further conclusions is, I think, as follows : He has 
taken the object as a mere distinguishable aspect of experience, and he 
retains this mode of statement even after he has put a reality back of 
the objective side. Object now may mean, either a particular group of 
elements in the stream of conscious processes (or, it may be, a particular 
way of viewing these), or it may mean this independent real : and it 
is only in the first sense that we are at all justified in calling it an 
aspect. But now Mr. Morgan goes on to identify subject and object 
with mind and body, 1 and, of course, to transfer what applies to one 
set of terms to the other also. But while the subject, as the inner 
aspect of experience, may indeed be identified with mind, the body 
cannot be identified in the same way with the object, for it constitutes 
at best only a very small part of the objective aspect of existence. 
Moreover, in which way does Mr. Morgan intend to use the word 
" object " as applied to the body ? as certain objective elements in the 
stream of consciousness, or as the supposed reality back of them ? 
His words might seem to favor the first view, but I think he would be 
forced into the other, for everything, nervous changes and all, when 
taken as it appears in consciousness, would come directly under the 
head of mind, and not of body. Mr. Morgan's process, therefore, is 
as follows : He starts in by distinguishing the object as an aspect, and 
nothing more. Then he puts behind this abstraction an independent 
reality to which it refers. This reality is next narrowed down to 
changes in the human body, and the whole of what in the first instance 
was the subjective side of experience is correlated with this small sec- 
tion of a reality existing alongside, and so outside, of consciousness, 
with the word "aspect," however, still retained. Inconsequence of 
this the line of correspondences is shifted, and instead of having, as 
before, a group of sensations correlated with a thing in the objective 
world, a flower, or stone, or whatever it might be, we find its correlate 
in a number of hypothetical brain processes, differing from it in every 
way. And now there is one step more. We have brought up with 
aspects, just as we started out with them ; but aspects of what ? There 
are three meanings that might be ascribed to the statement that body 
is the outer aspect of mind. We might be thinking of the conscious 
processes in which body is made known to us ; but these, as has been 
said, are a part of the conscious series itself, and so are not body, but 
mind. Or we might be referring to the unknown reality which we 
1 Introduction to Comparative Psychology, p. 9. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 20, 

have postulated back of objects. But this is just what Mr. Morgan 
needs as the metaphysical basis for both his series alike, and so he dis- 
solves this from any exclusive connection with the objective side, and 
assigns it the role, which at first was given to "experience," of serving 
as the real unity of which mind and matter are aspects. 1 But what 
sort of an existence, then, does matter have, which can justify our put- 
ting it on a level with consciousness, as equally a manifestation of the 
real? 2 We cannot ignore the fact, which modern philosophy has 
brought out so plainly, that matter is known only indirectly, through 
the medium of consciousness. When we speak of aspects we must, 
once more, have not only something which appears, but also something 
to which it is an appearance ; and so far as regards matter, we seem to 
have this in the conscious subject. But where is the second term to 
which consciousness is an aspect ? In consciousness we seem to have 
a real fact, thrown off in some way, it may be, from the underlying 
unity, but having also a degree of self-subsistence. Can we in like 
terms speak of matter as self-subsistent, as existing in the way we 
know it ? The whole history of idealism is a protest against this. 
Accordingly we find Mr. Morgan slipping into a mode of statement 
which really implies another theory. When he speaks of "one real 
process, objectively presented as energy, subjectively felt in conscious- 
ness," 3 it is hard to get away from the fact that consciousness is first 
hand and matter only second, and that, therefore, to put them on the 
same level is impossible. And we are naturally led to the standpoint 
which recognizes that there is no third and unknown reality, but that 
in the inner aspect itself reality is revealed to us. 

Before passing on to this, however, there is one more attempt to 
refer the two aspects to an entirely unknown reality which deserves 
attention. This is the theory which is presented by Professor Riehl, 
and which differs from metaphysical parallelism in general, in that it 
does not seek to apply the conscious aspect to reality as a whole, but 
confines it to a connection with the organism alone. In this way it at 
least avoids the difficulties attending the theory of unconscious mental 
states, and it agrees better with the natural view of mankind, which 
hesitates to attribute anything like consciousness to the inorganic world. 
Briefly, Professor Riehl's view is as follows: There are certain real pro- 
cesses in the universe, entirely unknown in their reality, but appearing 

1 Introduction to Comparative Psychology, p. 10. 
2 C/. p. 7. ^ Ibid., p. 331- 



30 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

phenomenally as matter in motion. At a certain point in these 
processes, when matter has reached a certain degree of organization, 
sensibility arises. But this new term, mind, is not a different thing 
from the phenomenon with which it is correlated. The two represent 
the same unknown process, on the one hand as experienced by myself, 
and, on the other, as viewed by an outsider. 1 Mind is not a product 
of matter, but of the unknown reality of which matter is a phenome- 
non. 2 In this way the difficulty as to the reciprocal influence between 
mind and body may be solved. Neither a mental fact nor a physical 
fact, viewed as a separate and distinct thing, can be said to be one the 
cause of the other. The will which seems to be a cause of motion is 
not an additional term which breaks into the physical series ; the will 
itself, viewed in one aspect, from the outside, is no more than a link in 
that series. At the same time, the presence of the mental side argues 
a difference in the unknown real cause, which does not allow the result 
to be just the same that it would have been had the mental fact not 
existed. So that we can still say that, in a sense, the will is the cause 
of the motion. 3 

Our experience, to follow out Professor Riehl's theory, tells us that, 
corresponding to certain of our sensations, there are real external 
processes, whose nature, however, is entirely unknown to us. And in 
imagination we can trace these processes back of our own life, and even 
of the life of the race, to a time when mind did not exist in any form. 
The reality, therefore, is entirely non-mental, until at a certain point 
a new product, consciousness, makes its appearance. But now mind, 
while it may not be reality in its deepest sense, is yet, we must suppose, 
more real than matter, which is a mere appearance and nothing more ; 
while a sensation, so far as it goes, is an actual fact in the universe, 
without necessarily standing for anything else. The very fact that the 
external world appears to consciousness would indicate that conscious- 
ness must have some degree of reality of its own, and be at least rela- 
tively independent of the external processes which appear. And the 
nearest conclusion from this would be that mind qualifies nature in a 
more thoroughgoing way than has so far been admitted. If it were 
really true, as we have supposed, that up to a certain point conscious- 
ness has been absent from the universe, then it follows that in the 
totality of existence a new thing has suddenly sprung up, unlike any- 

1 Philosophische Kriticismus, Bk. 2, Pt. 2, pp. 196, 212, Leipzig, 1887. 
1 Ibid., p. 198. 3 Ibid., p. 200. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 3 1 

thing that has gone before. But the rise of a new thing, consciousness, 
out of an entirely unconscious world-ground, involves difficulties of its 
own. The fact that mind comes into existence at all is enough to show 
that it is not foreign to the nature of existence, and so, unless we admit 
a break in the continuity of the real, we must think that reality already 
had mental threads running through it, which is much the same as 
saying it was conscious. But, without insisting on the last conclusion, 
it may be well to examine Professor Riehl's position in somewhat more 
detail. And, as nearly as I am able to make it out, the following is a 
fair statement of his general theory of knowledge : As phenomena of 
consciousness, we find subject and object always relative to one 
another, always correlated. This means, I suppose, on the one hand 
that we cannot know changes in objects which are not at the same time 
changes in conscious content, and, on the other, that a sensation is not 
given first as subjective, from which we then proceed to infer the 
existence of objects, but that it is only as over against the object that 
the subject can be known at all.' It is by an abstraction that we sepa- 
rate the two, and we cannot therefore suppose that matter, the physical 
side, has an independent existence as we perceive it. 2 The very fact 
of perception makes it relative to consciousness. But, while this is 
true of it as object, that is, as phenomenal, we must nevertheless 
believe that there is a real existence which is the cause of the phenome- 
non, and which is wholly independent of consciousness. 3 It is a clear 
dictum of sensation that it does not depend upon itself. Only, this 
reality must be wholly unknown in its nature, for to be known it would 
have to enter into a relation, and so be changed. The very fact that 
the real appears differently according as it is in relation to different 
sense organs is enough to show this. 4 Each sensation, then, represents 
the real in a certain relation, and if we choose out sight and touch to 
stand for our world rather than the other sensations, it is only because 
their greater persistency, and their spatial quality, make them more 
amenable to quantitative treatment. 5 But we can never take these as 
absolutely real, and derive, for example, sensations of sound from 
motions, for that is simply an attempt to derive one sensation from 
another. We only translate the unknown reality as it appears in terms 
of sound into terms of sight, so as to bring out its quantitative rela- 
tions more clearly. 

1 Philosophische Kriticismus, Bk. 2, Pt. 2, p. 30. 
*Ibid., p. 31. * Ibid., p. 189. 

* Ibid., p. 40. s Ibid., p. 37. 



32 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

The first ambiguity I find in this relates to the sense in which we 
are to understand that the psychical and the physical are mere abstrac- 
tions from what is directly given, the psycho-physical. Several answers 
are suggested, which do not seem to me by any means identical. First, 
there is the distinction between what does and what does not point to 
an external reality, between perceptions, that is, and feelings. 1 This 
cannot be ultimately tenable, for, in the first place, it is hard to see 
how that can be a mere abstraction which points to an independent 
reality, such as the correlated abstraction does not point to ; and, in 
the second place, the so-called physical phenomena are psychical occur- 
rences as well. Then, again, we may draw the line between a certain 
set of conscious phenomena, sensations of sight and touch, which, in a 
more or less arbitrary way, we choose to regard as our world, and all 
other phenomena; 2 but this is confessedly arbitrary, and cannot be 
final. The principle, however, which lies at the bottom of this choice 
may seem to furnish a more adequate line of division, and in this sense 
the physical world consists in the quantitative, as over against the 
qualitative, elements of experience. 3 Here the physical appears as 
undoubtedly an abstraction, though an abstraction, it is to be noticed, 
which is not made along the same lines as when previously the objective 
side was spoken of as abstracted. And, moreover, this conception is 
apparently to be regarded as ultimately valid, in so far at least as we 
are to consider that quantitative relations do represent actual relations 
in the unknown real. 4 If it were otherwise, I do not see how science 
could make use of it as a formula to cover all possible operations of 
the real, a formula under no circumstances to be interfered with by the 
introduction of qualitative terms. But here again, for one thing, we 
seem to be compelled to leave on one side a part of the conscious 
life, which has no quantitative aspect in the sense in which mechan- 
ical science takes account of it. The same fault can be found with 
still another principle of division, which Professor Riehl seemingly has 
in mind in what already has been referred to in regard to the relation 
of subject and object; the same fact is physical or psychical, according 
as it is viewed as an object or as a group of sensations. 5 This, I say, 
does not take in those facts of consciousness which are not objectified 
at all. The real problem that lies back of all these, in some degree 

1 Philosophische Kriticismus, Bk. 2, Pt. 2, p. 190. 

' Ibid., p. 38. '■Ibid., pp. 40, 193. 

3 Ibid., p. 24. scf. p. 182. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 33 

mutually inconsistent suggestions, I take it is this: The psychical, in 
some way or other, evidently includes all the contents of consciousness; 
and if physical and psychical are abstractions, both alike ought to be 
present in each conscious tact. The difficulty, therefore, lies in com- 
bining this coextensiveness of the two aspects with what seems the 
essential characteristic of the latter, its quantitative nature. Now, there 
is a way in which this can be done, if, that is, we oppose the whole 
series of our conscious states to the series of quantitatively determined 
physiological processes, as they appear to one who is looking at our 
brain. 1 And it is to this that Professor Riehl finally comes. But in 
doing so he has leaped from a relation within a single consciousness to 
what exists for two separate consciousnesses ; the psycho-physical is 
divided between the psychical which I am conscious of, and the phys- 
ical in the consciousness of another. This may be tenable in itself, 
but I am entirely unable to see how it is consistent with the position 
from which Professor Riehl starts, according to which the psycho- 
physical is the immediately given, unitary fact of experience. 

There is still another ambiguity that I find when this is brought 
into connection with Professor Riehl's doctrine of the unknowable. 
Here again we have a relation, not, however, as before, between phe- 
nomena, but a relation involving an external reality. As Professor 
Riehl nowhere to my knowledge clearly distinguishes the use he is 
making of the word in the two cases, I am inclined to believe that the 
force of his argument sometimes depends upon his passing from one 
use to the other ; at any rate, I do not find his treatment altogether 
clear. The ambiguity, perhaps, is brought out if we ask the question : 
To what is the unknown real relative ? Apparently there are two 
motives back of the conception. In a number of passages Professor 
Riehl says definitely, "relative to consciousness." 2 Taken strictly, of 
course, consciousness cannot be one of the related terms; things can 
only be related within consciousness, in any intelligible sense of the 
word. What, however, is meant, I suppose, is this : that in order for a 
thing-in-itself to be known, it must enter as an object into conscious- 
ness, and accordingly be related to a subject. 3 But this apparently 
formidable statement after all means nothing more than that, if I am 
to know anything, it must become an object of my knowledge; for the 
notion that a thing, to become known, has of necessity to lose alto- 

1 Philosophische Kriticismus, Bk. 2, Pt. 2, p. 200. 
2 C/. p. 143. *Ibid., p. 150. 



34 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

gether its original characteristics which it had out of knowledge, I am 
unable to see the justification, unless it is assumed to start with that 
reality is essentially unknowable, unrelated to consciousness. To say 
that such an unknowable thing cannot appear in consciousness, be 
known, except as it is falsified, certainly is true, but I do not feel the 
cogency of the premises. Without dwelling on this, however, we seem 
again here to have the relation between phenomenal object and subject, 
not between the thing-in-itself and something else. The unknown 
thing acts as cause of the phenomenon, and not as one of the related 
terms. There is nothing, indeed, to which the external reality can 
be related, except a noumenal Ego, or consciousness abstracted 
from its content, which I do not understand Professor Riehl to postu- 
late. But now I have an idea that there is mixed up with this quite 
another conception, that which involves the relation of the thing-in- 
itself to the various sense organs, from which consciousness arises as a 
product. In a sentence closely connected with one already quoted, 
he carefully avoids saying "related to consciousness," and says instead 
" that which becomes an object by entering into the relation which 
gives rise to consciousness;" 1 that is, I should say, which enters 
just into this relation with different sense organs, and so is differently 
perceived in each case, without ever revealing itself as it is in its own 
independent existence. According to this, then, an unknown process, 
given to us no matter how, by coming into relation with another 
reality, that which underlies, say, the organ of sight, sets up still a 
third process, which somehow has connected with it consciousness. 
This product, the perception, has no immediate knowledge of either 
the second or the third term of the series, but only of the first term. I 
do not see, therefore, how by itself it can involve a relation, unless 
there can be a relation with only one term. Moreover, there is, as I 
shall show in another place, no reason whatever, when we state the con- 
ditions exactly, for saying that the fact of consciousness may not give, 
not simply the existence, but the nature of the first term, just as it pro- 
fesses to do. But as I am not concerned at present directly with Pro- 
fessor Riehl's theory of knowledge, it is sufficient to have pointed out 
that there are obscurities in it. It remains to say a word more on the 
direct relation which it bears to his theory of parallelism. 

And the chief criticism I would make here is, that it is not fully 
apparent, on Professor Riehl's showing, how we are justified in calling 

1 Philosophische Kriticismus, Bk. 2, Pt. 2, p. 142; cf. p. 36. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 35 

the conscious fact and the appearance of my brain to a second observer 
aspects of the same thing. The former, indeed, cannot be called an 
aspect or appearance at all ; between it and the brain process there 
intervenes no sense organ, such as furnishes the ground for denying 
that our consciousness truly represents reality. It may be an aspect of 
a third object, but not of the brain process of which the second observ- 
er's vision is an aspect. Accordingly one of two things will have to be 
true. Either consciousness and the brain process are literally the same 
thing, and in that case I see no escape from saying that the reality is 
consciousness, of which the brain is the phenomenal appearance, and so 
that in this particular piece of reality at least there is nothing unknown ; 
or — and this seems nearer to what Professor Riehl has in mind — that 
consciousness is a product of the real process. But in that case it is a 
new fact added to the reality, and not an aspect of it ; and conse- 
quently it is not the same thing as the vision of brain molecules. If 
the particular movements which are correlated with the human con- 
sciousness are, on their qualitative side, sensation and will, why would 
not the natural conclusion be that other movements, homogeneous with 
the first, have the same conscious nature also ? This is, at least, easier 
than to suppose that consciousness is somehow all mixed up with a 
larger reality which is entirely unconscious, and that this mixture 
appears as motion. This latter conception is really meaningless, and 
if we do not accept the conscious nature of reality as a whole, we have, 
as I say, to set off consciousness as a product relatively independent of 
its ground ; and the homogeneous physical phenomena cannot then be 
taken as an aspect of the unknown process plus a heterogeneous pro- 
duct, but must refer to the unknown process alone. The first hypoth- 
esis is one that will be considered presently ; the second comes back to 
a parallelism, not between two aspects of the same thing, but between 
an unknown reality and certain products which somehow it manages to 
throw off. There is, indeed, in the notion that the qualitative side of 
existence may have the power to determine, without interfering with, 
the quantitative side, a suggestion which will be considered later ; but the 
value of this only comes out when it is separated from its connection 
with the doctrine of the unknowableness of reality. The very statement 
that there is such a thing as a qualitative side to reality is meaningless, 
if by insisting on the necessarily unknown character of reality we 
empty the word " quality" of all significance. 

I think it will be apparent from what has already been said that. 



36 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

on the principles of parallelism, if the attempt is made to put mind 
and matter on a level as aspects, recourse must be had to a third and 
unknown reality back of them ; but that the aspects, when subjected to 
criticism, refuse thus to be made equal, since consciousness shows a 
tendency to claim reality in a higher degree, and so to dispense with 
any unknown substratum. The idealistic type of theory which results 
from this may now be subjected to a more careful examination ; and 
as a transition to this, a word may be said in regard to Professor Clif- 
ford's mind -stuff theory, though in itself this can hardly be said, I 
think, to have much philosophical importance. According to Professor 
Clifford, feeling, or mind, is the reality of which body is the appear- 
ance to an outside observer; but mind is regarded as a mere aggregate 
of mind-stuff, appearing in the form in which we know it only in con- 
nection with the brain ; and mind-stuff is looked at, after the analogy 
of matter, as made up of minute bits of feeling, which thus form the 
ultimate reality. One general objection to this view will appear in 
what follows ; but few psychologists, I think, are apt to assent to it in 
the somewhat bizarre form in which Clifford left it. The conception 
of separate bits of feeling floating about, and uniting to form conscious 
minds, is rapidly being outgrown by modern psychology. Such a 
conception affords no rational basis either for the unity of consciousness 
or of the world, and it is attended by a multitude of other difficulties 
psychological and otherwise, upon which it will not be necessary for 
me to dwell. 1 In passing to more developed forms of the same type 
of theory it will be convenient to consider all of them more or less in 
a lump, without distinguishing them except as occasion may require. 
The first point, however, which suggests itself concerns rather that form 
of the theory which is presented by Fechner, though I am not certain 
that the question which it raises is a fatal one, or that Fechner may not 
already have met it more adequately than I give him credit for. 2 

If we follow out the illustration which Fechner' uses, then beneath 
all individual lives there is the one unitary life of God. Above this 
general level certain processes raise themselves, like a wave above the 
surface of the ocean, and these constitute the consciousness of an indi- 
vidual, the consciousness, say, which is bound up with our solar system. 
This exists for itself, but it is for God as well ; it still remains a part 

'For a criticism of Clifford, see Mind, Vol. VI, pp. 153, 365. 

2 1 have not had access to Fechner's more metaphysical works, and most of my 
information is at second hand, especially from Lasswitz' Life of Fechner. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 37 

of the ocean from which it sprung. On this wave, again, a similar 
wave appears, and so we may go on until we reach the topmost crest, 
in the actual consciousness of a human being. But now, to reverse the 
process, below the threshold of our conscious life lies the larger and 
more general organic life, and below this, perhaps, the planetary con- 
sciousness; and finally there is the ultimate connection of all alike in 
the life of God. 

Now, this would naturally imply that what I call my consciousness 
is only a relatively small part of a larger consciousness, which is coex- 
tensive with the processes of the whole organism ; and it implies also 
that this larger consciousness is not separate from my own, but includes 
it, that it knows and feels all that I know and feel, and a great deal 
more besides. For if the still deeper consciousness of the world takes 
up into itself everything that lies above it, so my organic consciousness 
must take up my clearly conscious life, and connect it in a conscious 
unity with itself. I do not think that Fechner means to suggest this 
conclusion. Apparently he supposes that my consciousness is the cen- 
tral consciousness of the organism, and not a mere element in a larger 
I ; and that subconscious processes, while they exist for themselves, 
are split off from my central consciousness, and only form a conscious 
unity with it when they cross the threshold. And there is at least some 
justification for this latter view in the fact that other conscious unities 
do, it seems, exist in the body distinct from that unity which I call 
myself. Unless I mistake his meaning, every physical system, simple 
or complex, is an individual ; and this would at least apply to the cells 
which form the body, and it is difficult to say to how many other of its 
constituent parts. Accordingly we cannot avoid the question as to 
what is the connection within the organism of these separate unities, 
which here at least do not stand in the relation of a smaller wave on 
the surface of a larger one. 

There are three possibilities which occur to me. Perhaps each indi- 
vidual system alike, including our actual consciousness, is a wave which 
rises above the surface of a single organic consciousness, this latter, 
again, rising above the still lower level of the planetary life. Apart 
from the previous difficulty that on this view our consciousness is only 
an element in a larger conscious unity connected with the body as a 
whole, it is a further objection that this gives only a mechanical con- 
nection to the different individuals which make up the organism. They 
exist alongside each other, not in the form of a system. There is only 



38 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

a substratum which joins them together, and the nature of this sub- 
stratum, moreover, is decidedly problematical. The same objection 
applies even more strongly to a second possible conception, namely, 
that such individual unities arise directly from the underlying planetary 
consciousness. This does not necessitate a conscious I which is more 
than the consciousness which I myself experience, but it does away with 
a unitary organism altogether. And another query also might arise 
regarding both these suppositions. The organic life represents a more 
simple order of conscious facts than my self-conscious life, and we 
should expect this to indicate the direction of greater and greater sim- 
plicity. But it is chiefly of these lower processes that the life of God is 
made up ; points of consciousness with so high a development as man 
displays are comparatively rare, and it hardly seems likely that they 
are sufficient to dictate the quality of the whole. Are we, then, to draw 
the inference that God's life is less highly developed than our own ? 
This is at least a possible conclusion. 

In what has preceded, certain points of view have made their 
appearance, without, however, being able so far to find an adequate 
ground. There has been the thought of reality as a thoroughly articu- 
lated whole, a growing complexity of systems from the simple to the 
complex, and so of the organism, among other things, as showing 
these same characteristics in its own individual structure. And the 
human mind has been looked upon, in accordance with the natural 
standpoint, as representing the central reality of the organism on its 
conscious side. There is a third conception, now, which would give 
validity to both these postulates. As physical systems combine in 
ever larger systems to form cell, organism, planet, and whatever may 
be beyond these, so human consciousness might be regarded as a stage 
in the ascending series which leads from the simplest individuals, rep- 
resented in the least complex physical and chemical systems of the 
body, up to the life of God. From the analogy of the physical world, 
this would seem the natural conception, and it certainly has points of 
contact with Fechner's thought. All the elements of the absolute 
consciousness, it will be noticed, have thus an existence for themselves 
as individuals, though the combinations into which they enter may 
throw an entirely new light upon them. 

But now, to make this view consistent, it is impossible that the 
lower organic consciousness and the planetary consciousness should 
both be below the threshold for me ; they must lie in opposite direc- 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 39 

tions. And in whichever direction they are taken to lie, the result is 
not satisfactory. If all the organic processes are above the threshold, 
then we are conscious of them directly, and this contradicts both Fech- 
ner's statements and the facts. If a lower consciousness exists only as 
it forms an element in my actual consciousness, it does not exist at all, 
for I am not conscious of it; and, similarly, if conscious elements are 
so altered beyond recognition by entering into combination, all indi- 
vidual processes would be irrecoverably lost, not simply transcended, 
in the life of God. A conscious state is what we are conscious of, it is 
not a multitude of hypothetical simpler states of which we are entirely 
ignorant, except as the outcome of a process of reasoning. Uncon- 
scious mental states in this sense are inconceivable. And since the 
life of God is all, lower processes would not exist. If, on the other 
hand, we take these other processes as actually existing below the 
threshold of our own consciousness and separate from it, though capa- 
ble, it may be, on occasion, of crossing the threshold, we are under- 
mining the plausibility of the conception of God as the all-inclusive 
life. Human consciousness is, according to this, not something which 
includes lower systems within itself, but an addition to them, just as 
the system of the heavenly bodies may be considered as above, and 
relatively independent of, the smaller systems of molecules and organ- 
isms which compose the world. And so, if man is a direct chain in 
the link which leads to God, we should have to suppose, on the same 
analogy, that above human consciousness there is a higher conscious- 
ness connected with that larger system which, overlooking the law of 
the individual organism, connects all organisms together; and, above 
that, another system still, until we reach the final synthesis in God. 
But the lower systems are not taken up into this life of God ; they 
similarly are below the threshold for him, and so God is not complete 
reality after all. I do not see, then, that we are left with any consist- 
ent notion as to how conscious individuals enter into the make-up of 
a larger unity. Fechner suggests that individual human minds are 
connected in the world consciousness as separate sensations are con- 
nected in our own. But this merely shows how a process ordinarily 
below the threshold can rise above it, not how two systems on 
different levels can be combined as a conscious whole, while still 
remaining two. Whatever a sensation may be outside my conscious- 
ness, when I perceive it it has become a part of the system which my 
consciousness represents, and for the time being, so far as psychology 



40 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

shows, belongs to that alone. Before it crossed the threshold it may 
have had existence for another lower consciousness, but it was not 
identically the same sensation then, for at least its intensity was less ; 
and when, moreover, it once has crossed the threshold, it ceases to 
exist for the lower consciousness in becoming mine. I do not see why 
the same thing should not be true of the world consciousness as well ; 
whatever is for me is not for the world, and only can exist for the 
world consciousness if it ceases to be mine. If human minds, to 
repeat, exist comparatively unchanged within a larger mind which 
unites them all, then the subconscious bodily processes ought similarly 
to exist in the human mind, a supposition which has been considered 
already. For the comparison really to be enlightening, it would have 
to imply that a sensation, at the same time that it is my sensation, has 
in addition an existence for itself, and that for it the rest of my con- 
sciousness is below the threshold ; and this it would be difficult to 
maintain. Sensations, therefore, since they are elements in a single 
system, give no explanation as to how different systems can be com- 
bined. 

Whether these ambiguities which I have been considering are fatal 
to the theory or not, they suggest, at any rate, the need of a somewhat 
more careful elaboration. There is, however, a further difficulty con- 
nected with the spiritualistic type of parallelism, which is not confined 
to that form of the theory which Fechner represents, and which has to 
do with the relation that exists between the conscious reality and the 
objective or scientific aspect of the world. A general statement of the 
difficulty is this : There is, it seems, a reality, consciousness, and the 
phenomenal appearance of that reality in the material world. Now, 
from this one might naturally conclude, with Leibnitz, that matter is 
confused or imperfect perception. But the scientist will hardly be 
willing to grant this ; it is, indeed, hard to suppose that what we take 
as the type of exact knowledge, what serves as the explanation of all 
the facts that come to us through the senses, is only due to our finite- 
ness and limitation. And yet, what foundation can we give to it in 
reality? If God is all, then reality is to him as he experiences it, and 
there is nothing beyond him which can appear as a phenomenon. 
The reality is not my brain which another man sees, but my conscious- 
ness. My brain is real only as it forms part of this second mind. 
For a portion of reality, therefore, material processes may exist ; for 
reality as a whole they have no existence, except as in a fragmentary 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 4 1 

way they enter into the make-up of finite minds. And as we can no 
longer fall back, with Leibnitz, on a plan existing in the mind of God, 
since God is not something apart from the world, we must conclude 
that the whole system of relationships which science takes for its goal 
has, as a system, no objective validity. But if the world of science is 
cut off from God, how are we to account for its apparent orderliness 
and intelligibility, for the service which it renders us in explaining our 
experience ? If the system of atomic motions, which to an observer 
represents my consciousness, does not, as an actual fact, correspond to 
the reality for which it stands, what reason can be given why the 
formula should fit in with and anticipate experience so neatly, since 
even for finite minds it has existence only in the vaguest outline ? The 
matter is still more complicated by the question which may arise as to 
which of two very different things we mean by the phenomenal appear- 
ance which consciousness presents. What to me, we are told, is my 
conscious life appears to another as my brain. But is it really the 
brain which my neighbor might see if my skull were laid open ? or is 
it the hypothetical movements of hypothetical atoms which science has 
constructed ? Apparently the latter, for my brain appears, so far as 
my powers of vision can detect, much the same whatever thoughts 
may be going on in my mind. This phenomenal appearance, there- 
fore, is nothing that ever actually appears to anyone. I look at my 
neighbor's brain and have a vision of a grayish, corrugated substance. 
What is the conscious process which is the reality of that phenomenon? 
Evidently there is none. But then, how can I be so sure of the phe- 
nomenal counterpart of my neighbor's conscious life, if this never 
actually appears ? Clearly there is some connection between the two 
objective worlds of perception and of science, but it is not so clear 
just what the connection is. 

However, passing over the world of naive perception, we may con- 
fine ourselves simply to the world of science. Molecular vibrations, it 
was seen, and, a fortiori, all other objective phenomena, are entirely dif- 
ferent from the supposed realities of which they are phenomena, and con- 
sequently the only section of reality I know anything about is that little 
piece which I call myself. As my states, objective visions are real ; 
but unless now they are more than my states, I am shut up to subjective 
idealism. But how can they point to anything beyond themselves, 
when by the terms of the theory they are mere phenomena, confessedly 
different from the reality ? The contents, at least, differ absolutely ; 



42 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

may the relations after all be the same ? But relationships cannot 
hang in the air ; to be real they must be relationships within reality. 
And since my consciousness is one particular section of reality, I ought 
to be able to detect in it the formulae which appear in the scientific 
construction of my' brain movements. Evidently if I could do this, 
physiological science would be a much easier matter than it is at present. 
It may be said that it is just our actual sensations which do lie at the 
basis of our scientific formulation of the world, and so that the rela- 
tionships are present, at least implicitly. But, of course, for science, 
the formulae which are got from the data of our external perception 
are referred, not to me, but to other objects, or, on the hypothesis of 
parallelism, to other beings ; they are not the appearance of my section 
of reality at all. Accordingly we have no right to say that this or that 
material object is in reality a conscious being, but only that we have 
this or that perception ; and even if we could thus get beyond our- 
selves, we should not be much better off, for we should have to confess 
that as to the real nature and meaning of the world we were wholly in 
the dark, unless, perhaps, we fell back again on something like the 
unexplained, preestablished harmony of Leibnitz. 

This conclusion is, indeed, partially admitted by Wundt, in so far 
at least that the extension of the psychical nature of reality to the 
world at large is recognized as a mere hypothesis, and incapable of 
proof. And more than this, the foundation of Wundt's whole theory 
rests upon the same postulate ; and if I am not mistaken, it is only 
because, in the course of his argument, he makes a transition to a very 
different standpoint, that he can admit the conception of a metaphys- 
ical parallelism even as a possibility. There are few critics who are 
willing to confess to a clear understanding of Wundt's theory of apper- 
ception, but at least in a general way his position is as follows : What 
we call the physical and the psychical are not by any means to be 
regarded as two distinct substances. On the contrary, they both deal 
with identically the same reality, but from different points of view. 1 
We can abstract from the subject of experience, and can take objects 
as existing by themselves ; and as such they make up the external 
world. But just this same experience from which we have abstracted 
is, when taken immediately, what we call the psychical. It is the differ- 
ence between regarding experience as a manifold of processes and as 
a manifold of substances; 2 in the latter case we have the same experi- 

'Grundriss der Psychologie, pp. 3, II. 2 Ibid., p. 368. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 43 

ence, but certain elements have been left out. To explain the object 
thus abstracted, we introduce various supplementary concepts, which, 
however, become useless as soon as we begin to deal again with the 
whole of reality as immediately given.' Substance is one of these 
supplementary concepts. There can accordingly be no question of an 
interaction between the physical and the psychical, for that would 
mean an interaction between the immediate and the conceptual, abstract, 
orders of existence; 2 we have instead an identity, viewed, however, in 
two different ways. But the parallelism which results in this way is 
not a metaphysical principle, to be applied forthwith to the entire uni- 
verse ; as a matter of fact there are a vast number of objects which we 
can approach only mediately, through the method of the natural 
sciences, and there are other facts, again, which are presented only 
immediately — all those contents of our consciousness which do not 
have the character of ideational objects. Certain facts, however, belong 
to both kinds of experience, and it is to these that the principle of 
psycho-physical parallelism applies. 3 But it cannot apply, then, to 
what makes up the specific character of psychological experience, and 
this includes, among other things, the characteristic combinations and 
relations of psychological elements and compounds. 4 It is true that 
there are combinations of physical processes running parallel to these, 
but the characteristic content of the psychical combinations can in no 
way be a part of the causal relation between the physical processes. 
The psychical synthesis does not contradict the laws of causation, but 
neither is it accounted for by them, because natural science purposely 
abstracts from all that makes the psychical combination specifically 
what it is. 

Now, the objection which I should bring against Wundt's argument 
is, in general, this : If the physical has to do with the objects of experi- 
ence, which have thus been precipitated from their fluid state as con- 
scious processes, and been given a substantiality and fixedness of their 
own, then by definition it is independent of those elements which char- 
acterize the psychical processes as such, here, particularly, of the com- 
bining function ; since, as abstracted, it can only be subject to a 
connection in space and time. But is this equivalent to saying that, 
since the brain processes are physical, it is only with the objective ele- 
ments of experience that they are parallel, not with the volitional or 

1 Grundriss der Psychologic, p. 6. 3 Ibid., p. 371. 

* Ibid., p. 37 1 . « Ibid., p. 373. 



44 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

apperceptive ? I do not think it is at all. Abstract the objects which 
make up the content of my experience from the experience in which 
they exist, and, of course, there is nothing in the former which explains 
the elements that have been left out. But the relation of the whole 
of consciousness to the brain processes is not due to such an abstrac- 
tion. I am, indeed, entitled to say that the conceptual additions which 
were originated to explain the physical aspects of experience, the rela- 
tions of objects, do have this value only with reference to objects, 
and not to the parts of experience which physics abstracts from. But 
here objects are taken as objects, not as elements of consciousness, and 
we have a relation, not between the physical and the psychical, but 
between two aspects of the physical, the naive and the scientific. And 
it is a relation between all the objects of our experience and the whole 
of the conceptual world of science. On this view, brain processes 
would be related, not to our sensations in general, but to that object 
of external perception which we call the brain. How, now, do we get 
from this to a relation between a certain small section of physical pro- 
cesses and certain psychical elements which run through our whole 
experience, not even objects, it will be noticed, but sensations ? By 
starting out, I think, from one standpoint, and then shifting without 
notice to another. If the one experience is all we have, then it may 
be that the physical is that experience looked at from a certain abstract 
point of view, and we shall have, not two things, but one. But in that 
case, I should say, the parallelism of the physical and the psychical 
would be coextensive with experience itself. The physical world would 
be an abstracter copy of the world of immediate experience, only with 
some of the filling dropped out. Wundt, however, goes on to say that 
it is only certain elements in experience in which both sides appear ; 
most objects are given only mediately. But this means that we now 
are taking objects as distinct from experience, and not as mere abstrac- 
tions from it. 1 It is not enough to say that we merely take these objects 
as distinct for certain purposes, recognizing all the time that they are 
in reality abstractions. We cannot get to a conclusion by means of an 
hypothesis, and then hold to the conclusion while we throw the hypoth- 
esis overboard. And it is only on the hypothesis of realities distinct 
from our experience that we manage to make a transition from the 
physical world as an abstraction from the whole of experience, to the 
conception of a parallelism between the same whole experience, and a 
1 Cf. Grundriss der Psychologie, p. 370. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 45 

very small part of the physical world, the brain processes. And so, 
when we have reached this latter result, we have no right to keep to our 
former statement that physical and psychical are only two ways of 
looking at the same reality ; for we have more than the reality of our 
experience : we have this experience set in a world which enormously 
transcends it. If we compare Wundt's statement at the start with the 
statement with which he ends up, the difference, I think, will be appar- 
ent. His first statement is this : " It follows, then, that the expres- 
sions outer and inner experience do not indicate different objects, but 
different points of view from which we start in the consideration and 
scientific treatment of a unitary experience. We are naturally led to 
these points of view because every concrete experience immediately 
divides into two factors, into a content presented to us, and our appre- 
hension of this content." 1 And so at the end he continues to use this 
same conception of a unity of experience apprehended from different 
sides ; physical and psychical are still nothing but components of a 
single experience, the psycho-physical, which is merely regarded in the 
two cases from different points of view. 2 But how are we to make a 
unitary experience out of sensations and brain motions ? If we notice 
what Wundt meant by a unitary experience in the first place, we shall 
see how far off the track he has got. 

Theories of parallelism, as we have seen, have been originated for 
the purpose of justifying that scientific attitude which tends to look 
upon the physical world as subject to invariable laws, which do not 
admit the intrusion of other, spiritual, elements that would break the 
continuity. In examining these theories, difficulties of various sorts 
were found, which they did not satisfactorily meet. If we took mind 
and matter as two substances differing in kind, then we found there 
was no way available of bringing them together. The next step, 
consequently, was to deny that we had two things at all, and to find 
true being in a reality differing from them both, of which they were 
somehow sides or aspects. But it soon appeared that the figure which 
these words imply could not easily be carried out, principally because 
the thought side showed an invincible tendency to exalt itself above 
the side of matter, and to refuse to be put in the same category with it. 
Consequently we were led to look for reality, not in a third substance, 
but in one of the two we already had on hand, while we degraded the 

1 Grundriss der Psychologie, p. 3. 'Ibid., p. 371. 



46 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

other to the rank of mere appearance. But when we tried to give to 
matter the title of reality par excellence, we found that this left con- 
sciousness wholly unaccounted for, while we also got into difficulties in 
attempting to fit our conception into any tenable theory of knowledge. 
The only thing left, then, was to find reality in the conscious life as 
such. But in trying to work this out along the line which Fechner 
brought into fashion, and allow but a single fact of existence which 
appears as consciousness or as matter, according to the way we look at 
it, it was seen, again, that the conception failed to make itself clear, 
and that it resulted in an agnosticism quite antagonistic to the spirit 
of the theory itself. 

The path which still is left open is, consequently, a pretty definitely 
limited one. Reality, whenever and wherever it is found, is of the 
nature of experience ; and the sections of reality which are represented 
by the outer world and by the lives of individuals are not one thing 
looked at in different ways, but quite distinct — -these are the postulates 
of the conception which I shall advance, arrived at by a process of 
exclusion. The problem once more, accordingly, is this : Science 
denies the influence of consciousness on the physical world. Never- 
theless, when brought face to face with this conclusion as the last word 
in the matter, the human spirit rebels against the thought that reality, 
in its final analysis, is a mere mechanical, unmeaning process. It 
demands the spiritual as the presupposition of the natural, and it backs 
its demand by showing that what we call matter is, after all, only known 
to us through the medium of consciousness. And it also points to the 
human body, where, palpably, matter is affected by mind, and where 
it is an overturning of all our natural way of looking at things, as well 
as of that habit of thought which science has fostered, and which makes 
us look, in explanation of a new phenomenon in the organic world, to 
the advantage it gives the organism, to deny that we, as conscious 
beings, are the necessary explanation of movements in the physical 
world. 1 The only way I can see, therefore, 2 of getting out of the dif 

1 For a statement of the general arguments in favor of an interaction, see James, 
Psychology, I, pp. 128 ff. 

'Granting, that is, the validity of the general point of view here adopted. In the 
following pages I shall confine myself to a statement of the position which I wish to 
suggest, without attempting to justify its presuppositions, or to consider any save a 
few of the metaphysical difficulties which it involves. For this the excuse, of course, 
will be that I am not trying to set up a philosophical system, but only to reach a ten- 
able solution of one particular problem. In so far, however, as this solution seems to 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 47 

ficultv without sacrificing either the continuity of the physical series or 
the intelligibility of the psychical, is by supposing that the physical 
universe of science is not in itself final, but that it merely expresses the 
way of working of a spiritual reality, whose essential characteristics we 
know in that conscious self which, in relation to our own bodies, has 
at least the appearance of giving laws to matter. Such a position 
would agree with Leibnitz and Fechner in making the reality of the 
world spiritual, but it would not agree in reducing the world of exter- 
nal perception and of science to a mere phenomenal appearance, wholly 
different from the reality it represents. With materialism, it would 
recognize in these a knowledge which, so far as it goes, is true, but, 
nevertheless, following the suggestion of Riehl, it would subordinate 
the quantitative mechanism of science to the side of quality or mean- 
ing, through which the former would be determined. In what follows 
I shall endeavor to make clearer what I mean by this ; and since the 
whole question as to the possibility of a mutual influence between the 
two series turns upon what we understand by the term causation, it will 
be necessary to begin with a somewhat extended examination of this 
concept. In this examination I shall try to develop a theory as to 
the nature of the causal influence which shall render it possible to 
accept what common sense seems to demand, without at the same time 
disregarding any reasonable claim of science. 

Mill's treatment of causation may be taken as a convenient starting- 
point. According to Mill the only link between two events which we 
can discover is invariability of succession, and it is this which lies at 
the bottom of our ideas of causation. Without inquiring whether 
experience is really of such a nature that our belief in the universality 
and necessity of causation is fully accounted for as a mere induction 
from instances of invariable sequence, it is enough to notice that Mill 
himself seems to admit that mere invariableness is not sufficient. Tak- 
ing the statement as given above, it is not easy to see why the objec- 
tion that this would make day the cause of night is not justified. In 
trying to show that it is not justified, Mill admits another element, 

meet the requirements, it will naturally add so much weight to the presuppositions on 
which it is based. The standpoint which I adopt, in opposition to what may roughly 
be called Hegelianism, is dualistic to this extent, that it postulates a certain separate- 
ness of existence on the part of individuals, and of that absolute reality represented by 
the world. A metaphysical justification of this position, especially from the side of 
epistemology, will be found in an article entitled "Epistemology and Experience," in 
the September number of the Philosophical Review, 1898. 



48 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

necessity or unconditionalness. By invariable antecedent, he says, we 
mean not simply that the antecedent always has been followed by the 
consequent — which would seem to be all that his premises allow — but 
that so long as the present constitution of things endures, it always 
will be so. As between mere invariableness in the past, therefore, and 
necessity, however that may be interpreted, causation always implies 
the latter. A single instance may be enough to make us join two 
events as cause and effect, a thousand may be insufficient. It is, there- 
fore, necessary to look further than to mere experience of past invari- 
ableness to discover the nature of this necessary connection. 

As one way of approaching this, a second question may be asked: 
Does the cause precede the effect, or is it simultaneous with it ? Mill 
leaves this question undecided, as of no importance for theory. The 
ordinary answer probably would be that cause and effect are successive. 
This is a natural consequence of our practical use of the concept. We 
cannot use a cause to produce an effect, or predict an effect from its 
cause, without practically taking the time interval into account. On 
the other hand, it may be asked how an event which is past, and, there- 
fore, unreal, can produce the real. Or, again, how can anything be a 
cause unless the effect is already there ? If the effect is delayed, then 
some other cause is required to account for it. 

Without entering into an examination of this for the present, it is 
enough to point out that, if it is to throw any light on the problem of 
necessity, it must be carried further. If we have merely two events, 
whether successive or going on together, there can be no bond between 
them. If any link were inserted, just the same problem would arise as 
regards the relation of this link to both. If the two are given as sepa- 
rate at the start, no way appears of bringing them into connection. 
To avoid this difficulty, are we not bound to regard them as both 
originally elements of a larger whole, and only ideally to be distin- 
guished ? A cause is a cause, not in itself, but by reason of its place 
in a more inclusive reality. But in this case it might appear difficult 
to distinguish between cause and ground. Given a certain whole as a 
fact of experience, and its elements are logically related, so that they 
reciprocally and necessarily imply each other. Cause and effect would 
thus mean, either that if a part of a whole is given the rest is neces- 
sarily implied, or that, given an event, its cause is the explicit state- 
ment of its conditions, since it is impossible from this standpoint to 
maintain sharply the distinction between cause and effect. This is 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 49 

Mill's sum of conditions, except that while Mill tried to connect this 
with invariable succession, by making the effect follow the sum of its 
conditions, in reality it must be the sum of its conditions. The cause 
of day is the presence of the sun in a certain relative position to the 
earth. But day is not something that follows these conditions ; they 
are what we mean by day. 

There is no doubt that this represents a position which, for many 
purposes, is satisfactory, and yet the naive standpoint naturally feels a 
difficulty with it, when it is taken as a complete statement. This diffi- 
culty consists partly in the fact that apparently it takes causation out 
of time altogether, and makes of it an eternal fact. It gives to it 
necessity, but it is the same necessity that belongs to a geometrical 
truth. Causation is our key for explaining the world of change, and 
this would seem to make change impossible, or at least to have no 
relation to it. If the cause is the effect, then all causes and effects 
appear to flow together and become synchronous, and nothing to be 
except an unchanging logical ground. The difficulty is evidently con- 
nected with that something which the na'ive view almost always identifies 
in some way with cause, and which we call efficiency, influence, power, 
force. Evidently there is no force in the logical antecedent which com- 
pels the consequent to be, and we therefore have to inquire whether 
this idea of force should be dropped from the concept of cause alto- 
gether, or whether it has some justification. 

In the first place, a distinction clearly has to be made between two 
different sorts of cases. In a geometrical truth all the conditions rele- 
vant are present as facts which bear no relation whatever to succession 
in time. If we conclude from the existence of a triangle that its 
angles are equal to two right angles, there is no possibility of its turn- 
ing out differently, for in the conditions which make it a triangle the 
whole unchanging and unchangeable system of relations is already 
there. Here we should hardly think of saying that the triangle was 
the cause of the magnitude of its angles. So if we say that day is 
caused by the presence of the sun, we also take no account of succes- 
sion ; the presence of the sun is day, as a single, eternal fact. But 
there is a difference when we come to events into which the time inter- 
val enters. If we ask the cause of a stone's fall, the sum of conditions 
would be simply an accurate description of the facts. Given two 
bodies of unequal mass, and they do as a matter of fact approach each 
other with velocities that follow a definite law. This we call gravita- 



50 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

tion, and say it is the cause of the stone's fall, though gravitation is of 
course nothing but a description of what actually takes place. Naive 
thought, however, is certainly not satisfied with this ; it demands some 
sort of power which makes the facts what they are, which makes the 
bodies approach. Does this demand rest on any sufficient basis ? 

To my mind there is a real justification for it, which marks it off 
from all such questions as simply demand the wherefore of existence, 
why a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, or why 
there is any world at all. It is not as a mere fact, but as an action, a 
change, that it calls forth the inquiry. A mere fact, when it is once 
given, we simply have to accept ; an event involves a new kind of con- 
nection within the fact, along the direction of the time succession, and 
it is just this connection which the idea of force supplies to popular 
thought, and which logical necessity is incapable of giving. Logical 
necessity requires that the whole fact be given, as a simultaneous, or, 
more properly, a timeless fact; and consequently it does not apply to 
the- — so to say- — lengthwise direction of an event. A succession of 
events is bound together by no such necessity, except as we look at it 
as completed, and so take it out of time. Uniformities of succession, 
therefore, as real processes, are dissolved from all connection with 
necessity, or with any bond except a temporal one. Suppose, as 
physics does, that we isolate two bodies from all conditions that will 
prevent their free action, then the fact is that they will approach each 
other according to a certain law. This is, by supposition, simply a 
fact, beyond which we cannot go. Now, if we take the fact as a whole, 
and say that the conditions are the cause of the event, then to say that 
in another case the same cause would have the same effect would be 
mere tautology, for the conditions are a description of the effect. But 
what we could not say is that the latter event might not in its first 
half coincide absolutely with the former, and then in its last half be 
wholly different, that the same two bodies might not at one time 
approach each other with velocities varying inversely as the square of 
the distance till they met, and at another time approach with accel- 
erated velocity till within a mile, and then stop, or go on with constant 
velocity. As a matter of fact, we should feel sure that other conditions 
had come in to produce the change, but I do not see that we should 
have any ground for this, apart from a subjective expectation of find- 
ing nature uniform, a belief with no foundation beyond Mill's induc- 
tive ground. That is, if cause is a mere statement of the conditions, 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 5 I 

then in the case of events in which the conditions are not complete in 
an ideal moment, but where an interval of time comes in between the 
beginning and the end, we have, so far as I see, no necessity what- 
ever that two events that begin exactly alike, and are subjected to no 
disturbing influences, should end the same. In the former case the 
necessity was a logical one ; given the whole and the part is implied. 
But here, since the whole stretches over an interval of time, the whole 
is not given, and there is no necessity. And the point is not that we 
cannot prove necessity absolutely, but that there is nothing on which 
necessity, or a bond of any kind, can be based. There is no sort of 
connection present, unless we abstract entirely from time, to give any 
rational ground for our conviction that a difference in the course of 
events implies the presence of new conditions. To get this, I think 
we are compelled to introduce into the concept of cause something 
apart from a mere description of the whole event ; that is, we come 
back to what looks like the idea of force again. And since force 
implies not simply an event, but something acting, it would seem 
impossible to refer cause simply to events, and to sever its connection 
with substantiality. 

If now it should appear that the conception of cause as efficient, 
effect-producing activity is an essential element in the make-up of our 
world of experience, and that the various other conceptions already 
noticed take their places easily in relation to this; and if we should 
find a way of conceiving the reality of force so as to make it intelli- 
gible, and strip it in some degree of its mysterious character, we should 
at least be in a position to avoid travelling too far from the everyday 
view of causation. A very little consideration is enough to show the 
part which the idea of force plays in the construction of the world. 
Our experience is a whole, as has already been said. It is not made 
up of separate qualities which combine into things, and separate things 
which combine into a world, but qualities and things are such only as 
parts of the universe. Now, a thing, taken solely by itself, might be 
looked at as a union of certain qualities belonging together in space. 
But really this is not sufficient to make it a thing. It does not thus 
exist by itself, but as a part of the world, and an essential element of 
thinghood is that it should play its part in this world ; in other words, 
that it should be causal. A thing that did not make itself felt, did not 
produce effects, would be a mere floating product of imagination. A 
stone that did not hold us up when we sat upon it, an arrow that did 



52 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

not pierce the animal's body and bring it to the ground, could not 
enter into relations at all with other things ; and a world made up of 
such isolated sense pictures would be a mirage, an unreal vision. 
Causality is, then, essential, it is the connection between things without 
which they could not be things in a common world. As surely as the 
world is a world of substances and not of mere thought relations, as 
surely as this world is a unity and not a mere collection of discon- 
nected things, the substances which make it up must act on and affect 
each other, that is, they must show causation. In order that the world 
should be a unity, it is not enough that one event should follow on 
another ; the first must somehow be the reason for the second. 

In one form or another, then, this idea of an active power must 
enter into a final definition of cause which shall contain all that we 
actually mean when we use the word. It is not enough that one stone 
should lie above another in space ; the second stone must hold the 
first up. It is not enough that a falling tree touches a man and the 
man then falls to the ground ; the falling tree knocks him down. Of 
course, for a satisfactory analysis it is impossible to stop here : I only 
wish to show that in the common-sense view the notion of force is 
essential to the causal concept. I shall attempt presently to indicate 
how the notion is to be more exactly defined. 

But to say that nothing can enter as a thing into our world of 
experience except as it enters into causal relations to that world, is 
not strictly equivalent to the ordinary axiom of causation, that every 
event, every change, that is, in a thing, must have a cause. Let us 
take an object that has been at rest and now begins to move. What 
has been said before would require that this moving thing, to be real, 
should in some way enter into causal relations with the rest of the 
world, affect and be affected. But what is the necessity we feel which 
prevents us from stopping with the simple fact that the thing begins to 
move, and compels us to hunt for a cause of this and of every other 
change ? I do not know that I can explain this except by saying that 
it is simply the necessity of making things intelligible. As a matter 
of fact, we can perfectly well imagine an event taking place without any 
preceding cause, if we merely cut it off from everything else and refuse 
to ask questions about it. But if we try to explain it at all, we can 
only do so by finding out its relationships to other things ; to become 
more than a brute fact, to enter into an intelligible system, it must, 
that is, in a world in which causality reigns, be referred to a cause. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 53 

It is evident that the result so far arrived at is not identical with 
the ordinary scientific conception, and we have still to consider the 
relation which the latter bears to it. And first with regard to the 
statement that the cause is the effect. There can be no doubt that this 
has an intelligible meaning for us. We do not hesitate to say that 
water is caused by the union of molecules of oxygen and hydrogen ; 
strictly speaking, the union of oxygen and hydrogen is water. We say 
that death is caused by poisoning, but if we state all the conditions 
accurately, the effect on the tissues, etc., then poisoning is death. 
Here cause means explanation, a spreading out before us of the one 
fact with all the relationships involved. But this is not using the word 
in the same way in which we have been using it heretofore. To take 
the first example, we apparently are not speaking here of an event at 
all, but of a mere fact, water ; and in that sense cause and effect are 
identical. But we also may refer to the actual coming into existence 
of water, and then we can speak of the cause in what, from the naive 
point of view, is a stricter way. It is not enough then to stop with 
the mere fact of the union of oxygen and hydrogen ; we may still go 
on to ask, Why do the molecules approach and join ?, and at once the 
concept of force comes in. And even when it is a question, not of 
the becoming, but of the being of water, science points us to a con- 
tinuous activity rather than to a simple fact ; and after our first ques- 
tion we may ask again, Why do the molecules perform these peculiar 
vibrations which lie at the basis of the phenomenon we call water? In 
other words, in explaining any fact which is really an event, and not 
merely a system of relations like a truth of geometry, the explanation 
which points to the sum of the conditions always involves in addition 
that causal action of objects on one another which we say is due to 
force. And for the reason that the causal relation, strictly speaking, 
is a relation between things, it is only in a secondary, or at least in 
another sense, that we can speak of the cause of a whole complicated 
fact or event. 

If, then, the idea of force is an essential element in our conception 
of causality, how is science justified in its tendency to rule the idea 
out ? Without pretending to lay down any definitive statement as to 
the problems and methods of science, I think that in a general way 
the reason is this : Science aims to explain the world by relating an 
event in certain definite ways with other events. Now, the idea of 
cause as force simply supplies us with a bond between things, it does 



54 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

not tell us at all what particular effects go with particular causes ; while 
it is just this which it is the business of science to discover. If we take 
such an event as the fall of a stone to the earth, the popular explana- 
tion probably would be at the present day that it is due to attraction 
between the earth and the stone. But this merely states why anything 
takes place at all. In reality we have an event of a definite kind, and 
it is the exact nature of the event that we are practically interested in, 
for the other element can be taken for granted. It is not simply two 
bodies that attract each other, but two bodies with a definite mass, and 
a definite distance apart. The effect is not simply the fall of a stone, 
but the stone falls with a certain velocity. Science aims to state these 
facts exactly, to describe in exact terms the whole event, in so far as 
this is necessary in order to get the law which it follows, of course with 
an interest in it not as an event, but as the means of reaching a for- 
mula which shall apply to other events as well. But with this aim it is 
evident that for science the concept of force is superfluous. Science 
does not attempt to state why, but how bodies move. It has to do 
with conditions, not cause ; cause in the sense of force is metaphysical 
or practical, and not scientific at all. 

For the scientist, then, the idea of force has no practical value. 
All that he cares to know is the law that events follow, the mathemat- 
ical relations that they disclose. But when he thereupon proceeds to 
say that for a larger world view also the concept of force is barren, he 
is going beyond his right. The answer to him is that, when we look at 
the world naturally, things do inevitably seem to affect one another. And 
if the skeptic tries to prove that all we possibly can know is a string of 
successive events, and that no scrutiny can reveal any bond between 
them, he has to meet the objection that at least we talk of efficiency, 
of one thing acting on another, and that, when we attempt to explain 
this as a mere time succession, invariably we find that we have not 
exhausted what we supposed ourselves to mean. 

It is quite as evident, however, that our first notion of force has to be 
modified. It is impossible to hold that force resides somehow in an 
individual thing, and passes over to the thing moved or affected. 
Force transference is unthinkable. We are accordingly led to think of 
the force as residing, not in the thing by itself, but in the larger reality 
of which the reacting things are both elements, and so, finally, in the 
reality of which the one universe is the expression, in order to avoid 
having a multitude of separate and, hence, unrelatable things on our 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 55 

hands. If, now, we try to go further, the only intelligible meaning I 
can give to force or efficiency is suggested by our own conscious 
activity. What can I mean when I say thai one thing affects another? 
Nothing, so far as I see, except as they stand in relation to an intelli- 
gible purpose, to an activity which is being carried toward a conscious 
end. Between two events, merely as events, there is no discoverable 
bond ; but there is a bond between them, and an intelligible one, 
when they are both looked at as elements in a purposeful activity. 
For with reference to the end one conditions, affects, the other. Of 
course, I do not mean that we cannot think of one event causing 
another except as we think of some purpose which they serve, though 
this might perhaps have been psychologically true in the origin of the 
idea of cause; but only that, if we try to make the connection intelli- 
gible, this is the only way in which we can represent it. Such a con- 
ception is not identical with the theory, which is very commonly brought 
forward, that we get our idea of cause from the action of the will on 
the external world, though it is more or less closely related to this. It 
is quite possible that the notion first arises in this connection. But 
what I have in mind is not a fiat of will as cause, followed by a phys- 
ical occurrence as effect, but the actual exercise of will as progress in 
purposive action, as an active experience. What I mean may be illus- 
trated by thought activity. In active thought we have the end in view 
determining the appearance and connection of the different thought 
elements, but each element also, not in its own power, but by its rela- 
tion to the ruling idea which is manifesting itself in the process as a 
whole, has likewise its influence on that which follows, is in a sense its 
cause. Now, if we can look on the world as representing the life of 
God, his conscious activity, and on individual things as the elements 
in that conscious life, then the same conception would hold good of 
them, though God's activity would have to be conceived as far more 
creative than our own thought life. Force, then, would be will, but by 
will we should not mean something that comes into the series of con- 
scious processes from the outside to change them, but this series itself 
regarded as an active process, and so as an expression of will. Force 
simply stands for the fact that reality is not a mere intellectual system 
of unchangeable relationships, but a movement, a process of active 
experience governed by purpose, such as our own lives reveal. Since, 
accordingly, it is only because this reality comes to us piecemeal that 
we feel the need of binding its elements together by some power which 



56 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

lies outside them, we must constantly bear in mind that the words 
necessity, efficiency, have lost much of their old connotation. 1 What 
we have is just the one active process of God's life, which, as active, 
we call will ; and the connection of the elements belongs to them, not 
through the application of external force, but simply because they are 
elements of a unitary conscious life. 

The idea of causality has thus led to the thought of the world as 
the realization of a conscious, creative will, analogous to what we expe- 
rience in our own conscious lives. Within this life there is a certain 
objective framework, as there is in our individual experience, and it is 
this which, divorced from the side of meaning and inner appreciation 
which it has in its own proper being, reports itself to us through the 
senses as the world of outer things. The question of parallelism, 
therefore, resolves itself into the question as to what connection our 
conscious lives and purposes have with the workings of this ultimate 
reality out of which they spring. And before this can be answered, it 
is necessary to consider the larger problem of the part which purpose 
plays in general in the explanation of the world. We say that events 
take place mechanically according to certain laws, and when it has dis- 
covered those laws, science has done its work and can go no further. 
But is it possible for philosophy to stop here, too ? I do not think 
that it is. When we have said that under such and such conditions 
two bodies act in a certain way, there is still a perfectly justifiable 
question to ask : Why do they act in this way ? I do not mean that 
we necessarily can find any definite or complete answer to this ques- 
tion, but only that the mere statement of a law is not of itself an 
explanation which we recognize as final, except as we can point out its 
place in the meaning of the world. This is simply the conviction, 
which no amount of criticism of the older argument from design has 
shaken, that when we trace the path which the evolution of the world 
and of man has followed, we find it far too intelligible to allow us ever 
to rest satisfied with the idea that it has come about by chance, or, in 
other words, that it is meaningless. Now, the only approach we can 
make to a practical answer — and this, I think, is actually the way in 
which we do look at the matter when we are not coming at it con- 
sciously from a scientific, and therefore abstract, point of view — is to 
say that it is the nature of the things concerned, a nature which we 
know from the qualities they present to us, and the part they play in 

1 Cf. Dewey, " The Superstition of Necessity," Monist, Vol. Ill, p. 362. 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 57 

the world, which makes them act according to the law, rather than the 
law which determines their nature. The law, that is, in the sense of 
physical and mechanical law, is not the presupposition of reality, but 
merely the way in which reality works; and we know reality most truly, 
not in atoms and molecules, but in the world of mutually reacting 
things which lies spread out before us and enters into the meaning 
of our lives. Even in science, when two chemical substances, for 
example, act on each other according to a law which differs from the 
law according to which two other substances act, we naturally are 
inclined to say that it is due to the nature of the chemical elements 
themselves. And my contention is that when this is interpreted cor- 
rectly it really is the case. According to such an interpretation, the 
absolute reality is a spiritual Being whose conscious life is in part rep- 
resented by the world we know; and the activity of this Being follows 
definite laws which can be discovered, and which, because they are 
regular and undeviating, we may call mechanical. The elements of 
his life, that is, have these regular relationships to one another. This 
one ultimate unity of law differentiates itself in what for us is a mani- 
fold of subordinate systems, and it is to these minor unities that what 
we know as things correspond. But instead of looking at the laws as 
ultimate facts, we are rather to regard them as wholly derived and 
secondary, and as determined to be what they are, directly by the 
nature of the thing for whose working they stand, but ultimately and 
really by the part which this thing plays in the purposive action of the 
one Being of whose life it is a partial expression. And this will remain 
true whether, on the one hand, science finally succeeds in deriving all 
phenomena whatever from a single formula or law, or whether we ulti- 
mately have to accept a number of such formulae, which cannot be 
reduced to one another, as the expression of those apparently different 
activities which we call physical, chemical, organic, and the like. So 
far at least we are in the latter position, and it is quite conceivable 
that we never should get beyond it. But even if the goal of mechan- 
ical science were attained, and we should at last be able to explain all 
phenomena alike from a single conception, such, for instance, as the 
laws which govern the impact of elastic bodies, I do not see that 
this would make any difference. No theory of science can ever alter 
the fact that the mechanism of the world has actually worked in a 
way which appears to us in the highest degree intelligible and, in the 
broad sense of the term, purposive. And if this working can be reduced 



58 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

to a single mechanical formula, that heightens, if anything, the impres- 
sion of intelligence displayed. It still remains incredible that the 
mere brute motion of atoms should have reached blindly these results, 
if they were entirely foreign to its nature ; that would at least require 
a distribution of the atoms to begin with against the probability of 
which the chances are enormously great. The final truth is therefore, 
again, the conscious, purposive life of the ultimate Being, and each 
individual element in this life is not determined mechanically by the 
law, but has its own share in determining what the law shall be. The 
purely mechanical view implies that reality belongs first of all to the 
atoms and the relations which exist between them as individuals, and 
that out of these certain products are built up. So that, once get a 
number of atoms with their immutable forces at work, and the history 
of the world is determined as a secondary result. But on the other 
view, our starting-point is not a host of separate atoms and forces, 
but the one world, and it is only in relation to this one world that the 
laws of the individual atoms are what they are. And this conception 
of a law of the whole, again, as determining the parts, has no real mean- 
ing until we get beyond the merely physical universe, which is a col- 
lection of individuals, of parts lying one outside the other, to the world 
of consciousness and purposive action, where the end in view gives a 
unity that binds the whole together. But while the ultimate explana- 
tion of things thus belongs to the realm, not of efficient, but of final 
cause, we are not to understand that the two realms contradict or inter- 
fere with one another. Efficient cause simply expresses the way in 
which purpose works itself out. And, of course, it does not follow that 
it is the business of the scientist to hunt for final causes. We do not 
know, and we never can know, the purposes of the universe in so defi- 
nite a way that we can deduce from them the mechanical law of its 
action, and so completely rationalize it. Science must of necessity 
work from the other direction ; in order to fulfill its- practical end it is 
in duty bound to have nothing to do with purpose or design, but only 
with the discovery of uniformities of working. 

It is outside the purpose of this essay to enter into a metaphysical 
justification of the possibility of such an absolute experience, and of 
our knowledge of it, but a suggestion may perhaps be made as to the 
general way in which it is to be conceived. What in our conscious 
life we find most difficulty in attributing to the Absolute is the com- 
pulsion, the comparative passivity which runs through it, and the recog- 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 59 

nition that it is based on something external, which we know, but are 
not. God's activity, on the contrary, must be creative throughout ; 
an " object " cannot be for him, as it is for us, something which is 
nized as existing independently, but must be exhausted in the part it 
plays within experience. Now, something of what this might be I 
think we have faintly shadowed forth in our own inner life of the imagi- 
nation, where we are able to get away to a degree from the feeling of 
externality and constraint which belongs to the life of the senses. The 
best example of what I mean would perhaps be found in artistic crea- 
tion. The materials must indeed be given us from without, but once 
given we can use them as we please. They appear for us and take their 
places in the stream of thought directly through their relation to the 
central meaning, without the need of anything mediate to set them in 
motion, as external objects need the action of the body ; and when we 
come to reflect upon them, they do not have, at least of necessity, the 
substantial character, the reference to a reality that lies beyond the 
experience itself, which makes objects of the senses so refractory to 
thought. This faded and colorless life of course is unreal as compared 
with the vivid life of the senses; but if we can think of it as gaining 
that vividness, that sense of reality, which belongs to external percep- 
tion, without at the same time losing its own self-contai.nedness, we 
might have some conception of the true nature of the ultimate real. 
Or, put from the other side, we may think of it as something such as 
our own active life in the world of sense perception would be, if that 
world, in all its elements, could answer directly and immediately to our 
will, if it presented nothing to us that was contingent, nothing that 
seemed to go its own way regardless of our purposes or even contrary 
to them, and to set up conditions which we simply must accept, no 
matter what our preference. Naturally this is not something that we 
can imagine, for we are not ourselves the Absolute, but it does not 
follow that we cannot think it. The whole purposive, meaningful 
course of the world would thus make up the life of God, and what we 
know as things would be elements in that life, as individual thoughts 
are elements in our own thought activity. The reality of "things," 
therefore, would be, not some indescribable substratum in which quali- 
ties inhere, but simply the subordinate unities within the conscious life 
of the Absolute, which, indeed, in reality are nothing separate, but 
which our abstracting thought is able to distinguish. It is only when 
we isolate these from the experience to which they belong that we need 



60 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

the concept of substance. And by purposive activity, again, we should 
mean, not that God has some future end in his mind toward which he is 
working as a goal, and for which the world is a means ; but that in the 
process of his life itself the purpose is immanent, that his life has a 
unified meaning for which, just as a process, it is the expression. For 
God the real and the ideal are one. He does not need to " stop and 
think," for there is nothing to break in upon his activity; his life is 
one of immediate experience, not of thought or judging. 

If such a conception were true, it would, as it seems to me, keep us 
from the necessity of breaking either with the validity of scientific 
knowledge, or with the na'ive belief in the reality of the world of per- 
ception. Science tends to reduce the world of the senses, the actual 
living world of color, and sound, and objects animate and lifeless, to a 
mere subjective phenomenon, and to find reality as such only in the 
complicated play of innumerable atoms in space. The ordinary man 
rebels at this ; to him the real is what he sees and feels. But now the 
philosopher comes in, and calls attention to the fact that the same argu- 
ment which makes color subjective applies just as truly to extension, 
and impenetrability, and, indeed, to everything that enters into the 
conception of the scientific world of atoms. We thus are driven to a 
complete agnosticism ; our consciousness cannot by any possibility 
give us reality as it is, but only as it appears. "The great fact insisted 
on by Descartes," to quote Mr. Huxley, " that no likeness of external 
things is or can be transmitted to the mind by the sensory organs, but 
that between the external cause of sensation and the sensation there is 
interposed a mode of motion of nervous matter, of which the state of 
consciousness is no likeness, but a mere symbol, is of the profoundest 
importance. It is the physiological foundation of the doctrine of the 
relativity of knowledge. The nervous system stands between conscious- 
ness and the assumed external world as an interpreter, and realism is 
equivalent to the belief on the part of the deaf man' that the speaker 
must always be talking with his fingers. There is no similarity con- 
ceivable between the cause of the sensation and the sensation." 1 

Now I should hold, on the contrary, that in so far as we know the 
world of perception, we know reality in a true sense as it is. In the 
same way in which we can know the contents of our neighbor's mind 
by reproducing these contents in ourselves, or, indeed, in the same 
way in which we can know our own past experience, so in external per- 
1 Science and Culture, p. 216. 



PROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 6 1 

ception we know the facts of reality approximately as they are in the 
absolute experience. The absolute is, indeed, far more than we know ; 
we only pick out details here and there, and piece them together, with- 
out being able to reach the point of view from which they all appear as 
a unified whole ; but nevertheless, so far as our knowledge goes, it is 
real knowledge. Granting there is such a thing as knowledge at all, 
there is no longer any impossibility that our experience should repro- 
duce reality, if reality is spiritual, of the same texture as our own con- 
scious selves. And this does not deny in any way the facts of science. 
The essential truth of science is the fact of law, of definite relation- 
ships which can be exactly expressed. It is interested in how reality 
acts, rather than in what it is. Accordingly it need not deny that the 
reality from which it is an abstraction is, in its completeness, a concrete 
experience, similar in nature to our own sensuous life, if only this be 
supposed to move in accordance with law, and to reveal definite con- 
nections between the elements which our thought can distinguish in it. 
All that we need contend for is that what we represent to ourselves as 
quantitative physical laws correspond to real relationships in God's 
experience, which have real value for it. In this way we can give back 
to the world the beauty and richness of life that science seems to rob it 
of. Indeed, while both views represent reality, that is, represent 
what has its counterpart in God's conscious life, the naive view of the 
world is in a sense more real than the scientific. For the mathemat- 
ical relationships of science, embodied in the world of atoms and forces, 
give only the framework of reality, the manner of its working on the 
quantitative side, while it is only as this is clothed upon with the fuller 
content of our everyday experience that we can begin to get at its real 
nature, and so its meaning. 

And to the difficulty as Mr. Huxley presents it there is an answer. 
Between the sensation and the cause, he says, there comes in a link 
which is completely heterogeneous, the nervous system ; how do we 
know, then, that the product corresponds to the reality which produces 
it, and, indeed, must not the cooperation of the nervous system inevi- 
tably falsify the product ? What lies at the bottom of this argument 
is, I think, a confusion which is apt to arise here between the fact of 
consciousness and the brain motion, and the consequent assumption 
that because the brain motion is not the same as the motion of mole- 
cules in the object which gives rise to it, so the conscious process can- 
not represent the object itself. But the conscious process is not the 



62 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

motion of particles in the brain, and bears no resemblance to it; it is 
not a causal product of the object and the organism in the sense in 
which the brain motion is, for causation, as it is used here, is applicable 
only to the physical world. Mr. Huxley's own illustration assumes as 
much. What the deaf man is interested in is not the symbols, but that 
which the symbols enable him to interpret. Through the symbols he 
does get to the reality, the meaning which exists in the mind of the 
person who is talking to him ; and he would get to the same reality 
whatever symbols might be used. 

It only remains, therefore, to define more exactly the way in which 
the relationship of mind and body is to be understood. We may 
grant to science that the brain is a mechanism, meaning by this that, 
like the rest of the universe, it works according to fixed laws, which 
science can conceivably discover, and that, moreover, in these laws it 
follows the principle of the conservation of energy. But why it should 
follow just these laws and no others is capable of a further explanation. 
In the same way in which we have supposed that every law that the 
scientist discovers has its source in the conscious, purposive activity 
of God, that each chemical substance, for example, is attracted or 
repelled in just the way it is by reason, ultimately, of the part which it 
plays in God's conscious life ; so, if in connection with the brain a 
quasi-independent consciousness appears, if, possibly, the deepest sig- 
nificance that we can discover in the world lies just in the development 
and the relations of such finite selves, then they, too, would help 
determine the laws of the world, and in particular of that special part 
of the world with which they stand in most immediate contact. God 
is a self, a unity of conscious experience, akin in nature to the life 
which we live as individuals. But just as our life has meaning only 
as it recognizes its place in a community of beings, of finite selves, 
whose mutual co-working for a common end constitutes the essence of 
our experience as such, while yet this experience as an existence is 
separate and distinct, so God's life is only real to him as he sets up a 
social order, a community of beings, of selves, whose experiences are 
as existences distinct from his, while yet it is only by the creation of 
such distinct unities of experience, and the working together with 
them for a common purpose, that the value of his own experience is 
constituted. What we know as objects in the external world form ele- 
ments in this life of God, and among these elements it is the body with 
which the reality of such finite experiences is more directly in connec- 



FROM THE STANDPOINT OF METAPHYSICS 63 

tion. As God's activity, expressed in the regular workings of the 
world of things, includes within its meaning the interaction between 
itself and finite lives, my consciousness will be a factor in determining 
what the mechanical laws of the world's activity shall be ; and this 
part which my consciousness plays will express itself most directly in 
the brain. No fact of my conscious life will be without its counterpart 
in some brain process, because my life is nothing except as it is in 
interaction with reality as a whole. But because it is meaning which 
determines law and not the opposite, the play of God's conscious life 
into mine is the ultimate fact; and because this is nothing that is arbi- 
trary or chaotic, but is subject to law, the law can be detected in the 
outcome. God's activity is in part represented by the changes in the 
physical world, and the law of these changes is determined by the fact 
that they are stages in a conscious and purposive life. But this pur- 
pose, again, is constituted by the relation in which the unity of experi- 
ence which makes up God's life directly stands to other finite lives 
which exist outside the limits of the physical world which science 
studies ; and so such lives help determine ultimately the laws of the 
world. Since, however, they do this originally, through the medium 
of the unitary purpose which establishes the laws, rather than by com- 
ing in afterwards to change laws already established, science cannot 
appeal to them. Above the system of quantitative relationships which 
make up the universe of science lies the world of meaning, of consci- 
ous purpose, by which the former is determined ; and of this world of 
meaning finite consciousnesses are a part. As such they are not to be 
explained by mechanism, for it is on them that the laws of mechanism 
depend, not, again, in their own power, but through the part they 
play in the activity of the whole. Consciousness accordingly is noth- 
ing that breaks into the mechanical workings of the brain from the out- 
side to deflect it from its course ; science needs none but mechanical 
laws in the case of the human body as well as of the stone ; for mech- 
anism only means that reality acts with a certain mathematically deter- 
minable regularity. What the nature of this regularity is it rests for 
science to discover. Once more, physical laws are only the quantita- 
tive expression for the working of spiritual laws. We can conceive that 
certain relationships of uniformity and regularity should exist between 
the elements of the absolute experience, which we get at in the form 
of physical laws. But these as such are an abstraction, and so depend 
upon the meaning of the experience as a whole, and, indirectly, upon 



1 



64 THE PARALLELISM OF MIND AND BODY 

the part which each factor has in that meaning. But it is only when 
we are inquiring into the why, the final cause, of the course of events, 
that we can appeal to meaning ; if we want to get at the how, the actual 
nature of the uniformities, we must look away from the world of mean- 
ing, and so from the conscious self, and have regard simply to what 
the course of events is. If we find the uniformity in it, the laws which 
we detect will not be interfered with by final causes, because final cause 
is just what we have abstracted from. Consciousness does not influ- 
ence the course of events by breaking into an order which is already 
established, but by helping to determine in the first place what that 
order shall be. 




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